What is historical objectivity? How do we know when a historian is telling the truth? Aren’t all historians, in the end, only giving their own opinions about the past? Don’t they just select whatever facts they need to support their own interpretations and leave the rest in the archives? Aren’t the archives full of preselected material anyway? Can we really say that anything historians present to us about the past is true? Aren’t there, rather, many different truths, according to your political beliefs and personal perspectives? Questions such as these have been preoccupying historians for a long time. In recent years, they have become, if anything, more urgent and more perplexing than ever. Debate about them has repeatedly gravitated toward the Nazi extermination of the Jews during the Second World War. If we could not know for sure about anything that happened in the past, then how could we know about this most painful of all topics in modern history?1
Just such a question has been posed, and answered in the negative, by a group of individuals, based mainly in the United States, who are certainly far removed in intellectual terms from postmodernist hyper-relativism, but who have asserted in a variety of publications that indeed there is no real evidence to support the conventional picture of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. There is a thin but seemingly continuous line of writing since the Second World War that has sought to deny the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other extermination camps, to minimize the number of Jews killed by the Nazis until it becomes equivalent to that of the Germans killed by the Allies, to explain away the killings as incidental by-products of a vicious war rather than the result of central planning in Berlin, and to claim that the evidence for the extermination, the gas chambers, and all the rest of it had mostly been concocted after the war.
A number of scholars have devoted some attention to this strange and disturbing stream of thought. The most important of their works is Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, by the American historian Deborah Lipstadt. Published in 1993, this book gave an extended factual account of the deniers’ publications and activities since the Second World War and identified them as closely connected with neo-fascist, far-right, and antisemitic political extremists in Europe and the United States. Whether or not Lipstadt was correct to claim that these people posed a serious threat to historical knowledge and memory was debatable. But the evidence she presented for the existence of the phenomenon and for its far-right connections seemed convincing enough. Lipstadt argued that denial of the Holocaust was in most cases antisemitic and tied to an anti-Jewish political agenda in the present. The denial of history was the product of political bias and political extremism, which had no place in the world of serious historical scholarship.
Yet how unbiased was Lipstadt herself? There was no doubt about her commitment to Jewish causes. Born in 1947 in New York of a German-Jewish immigrant father who was descended from a prominent family of rabbis, she had been brought up in what she described as a “traditional Jewish home,” she had studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for two years, and been present in Israel during the 1967 ArabIsraeli war. She had studied modern Jewish history, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust at university, and taught courses on the history of the Holocaust at a variety of institutions, including the University of Washington and the University of California at Los Angeles, before joining the staff of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1993, where she held an endowed chair and was setting up a new Institute for Jewish Studies. She was also a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council–a presidential appointment–and had acted as a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum while it was being built.
Aside from these academic credentials and activities, Lipstadt was also a member of the United States Department of State Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. In 1972 she had visited the Soviet Union and inspected sites of major Nazi killings of Jews such as Babi Yar. This was a period when controversy was being aroused by the Soviet authorities’ refusal to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, and there was a good deal of subtle and sometimes not so subtle antisemitism on the part of the authorities. Lending her Jewish prayerbook to an elderly Jewish woman in a synagogue in Czernowitz, Lipstadt was denounced to the authorities and arrested by the KGB for distributing religious items, strip-searched, held in prison for a day, questioned, and deported. After this, she had continued for some years to work hard for Soviet Jews while they were being persecuted.
Combined with her many discussions with camp survivors in Israel, she reported, this experience had led her to study the history of antisemitism and, in particular, the Holocaust. Remembering the Holocaust was crucial in the perpetuation of Jewish tradition, but also in teaching lessons about the need to fight prejudice and persecution of many kinds in the world today. However, Lipstadt insisted, whatever her political and religious beliefs, she was convinced that the history of the Holocaust had to be researched to the highest possible scholarly standards and taught in a straightforwardly factual manner. She denied any wish to impose her views about the lessons of the Holocaust on her students. After the publication of her book, Lipstadt left no doubt that her work on Holocaust denial had led some of the deniers to engage in “a highly personal and, at times, almost vile campaign against me.” She had been vilified on the Internet, accused of fascist behavior, and phoned up by deniers and depicted by them in “an ugly and sometimes demeaning fashion.” They had also left notes in her home mailbox. This had not stopped her from working in the field. Her book Denying the Holocaust was an academic project, but it had also taken on a broader significance.2
Lipstadt’s book, when taken together with her previous work, made it clear that her main interest was in reactions to the extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis rather than in the extermination itself. After completing her work on Holocaust denial, she planned a book called America Remembers the Holocaust: From the Newsreels to Schindler’s List. She had never written about German history and had never been in a German archive. Indeed, as far as I could tell, she did not even read German. She was really a specialist in the history of the United States since the Second World War. Yet it was easy enough for her to include in Denying the Holocaust refutations of some of the principal arguments of the deniers on the basis of well-known secondary literature about the extermination. Given the main focus of her work, which was on denial as a political and intellectual phenomenon, that was surely all that was required.
Nevertheless, her book did not pull its punches when it came to convicting deniers of massive falsification of historical evidence, manipulation of facts, and denial of the truth. One of those whom she discussed in this context was the British writer David Irving, who certainly did read German, had spent years in the archives researching the German side in the Second World War, and was the author of some thirty books on historical subjects. Some of them had gone through many reprints and a number of different editions. The great majority of them were about the Second World War, and in particular about Nazi Germany and its leaders. Before he was thirty, he had already begun researching and writing on twentieth-century history, publishing his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, in 1963, when he was only twenty-five.
Irving had also written The Mare’s Nest, a study of German secret weapons in the Second World War, published in 1964, and a book about the German atomic bomb, The Virus House, published in 1967. In the same year, Irving published two more books, The Destruction of Convoy PQ17, and Accident–The Death of General Sikorski. Despite their somewhat specialized titles, these books in many cases aroused widespread controversy and made Irving into a well-known figure. The Destruction of Dresden created a storm by alleging that the bombing of Dresden by Allied airplanes early in 1945 caused many more deaths than had previously been thought. The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 aroused serious objections on the part of a British naval officer criticized by Irving in his book. Accident generated considerable outrage by its suggestion that the Polish exile leader in the Second World War, General Sikorski, had been assassinated on the orders of Winston Churchill. By the end of the 1960s, Irving had already made a name for himself as an extremely controversial writer about the Second World War.
With the publication of his massive study of Hitler’s War in 1977, Irving stirred up fresh debate. In this book, he argued that far from ordering it himself, Hitler had not known about the extermination of the Jews until late in 1943, and both before and after that had done his best to mitigate the worst antisemitic excesses of his subordinates. Irving heightened the controversy by publicly offering a financial reward to anyone who could come up with a document proving him wrong. The furor completely overshadowed his publication of a biography of the German general Erwin Rommel in the same year, under the title The Trail of the Fox. The following year, Irving brought out a ‘prequel’ to his book on Hitler and the Second World War, entitled The War Path. In 1981 he published two more books–The War Between the Generals, devoted to exposing differences of opinion among the commanders of Hitler’s army during the Second World War; and Uprising!, arguing, to quote Irving himself, “that the Uprising of 1956 in Hungary was primarily an anti-Jewish uprising,” because the communist regime was run by Jews.3
The stream of books continued with Churchill’s War in 1987, Rudolf Hess: The Missing Years published in the same year, a biography of Hermann Göring (1989), and most recently a book on Goebbels: Mastermind of the ‘Third Reich’ (1996). And while he was producing new work, he also published revised and amended editions of some of his earlier books, most notably, in 1991, Hitler’s War, which also incorporated a new version of The War Path, and in 1996 Nuremberg: The Last Battle, an updated version of a previously published book, reissued to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
Despite all this, Irving had never held a post in a university history department or any other academic institution. He did not even have a degree. He had started a science degree at London University but never finished it. “I am an untrained historian,” he had confessed in 1986. “History was the only subject I flunked when I was at school.”4 Several decades on from his self-confessedly disastrous schoolboy encounter with the subject, however, Irving clearly laid great stress on the fact that the catalogue of his work demonstrated that he had now become a ‘reputable historian’:5
As an independent historian, I am proud that I cannot be threatened with the loss of my job, or my pension, or my future. Other historians around the world sneer and write letters to the newspapers about ‘David Irving, the so-called historian’, and they demand, “Why does he call himself a Historian anyway? Where did he study History? Where did he get his Degree? What, No Degree in History, then why does he call himself a Historian?” My answer to them, Was Pliny a historian or not? Was Tacitus? Did he get a degree in some university? Thucydides? Did he get a degree? And yet we unashamedly call them historians–we call them historians because they wrote history which has done (recte: gone) down the ages as accepted true history.6
This was true. Irving could not be dismissed just because he lacked formal qualifications.
Irving was clearly incensed by a reference to him on page 180 of Lipstadt’s book as “discredited.” Lipstadt also alleged in her book that Irving was “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence,” she wrote, “he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda.” According to Lipstadt, Irving had “neofascist” and “denial connections,” for example, with the so-called Institute for Historical Review in California. More important, Lipstadt charged that Holocaust deniers like Irving “misstate, misquote, falsify statistics, and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable sources. They rely on books that directly contradict their arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors’ objectives.” Irving himself, she claimed, was “an ardent admirer of the Nazi leader,” who “declared that Hitler repeatedly reached out to help the Jews” (p. 161). Scholars had “accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes . . . of skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler.” “On some level,” Lipstadt concluded, “Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy.”7
These were serious charges. Historians do not usually answer such criticisms by firing off writs. Instead, they normally rebut them in print. Irving, however, was no stranger to the courts. He wrote to Lipstadt’s English publisher Penguin Books in November 1995 demanding the withdrawal of Lipstadt’s book from circulation, alleging defamation and threatening to sue. Lipstadt responded, pointing out that her book mentioned Irving only on six out of more than three hundred pages. The publisher refused to withdraw; and Irving issued his defamation writ in September 1996.8 By December 1997, the legal process of mounting a defense against the writ was well under way, and a date for the proceedings to be held before the High Court in London was due to be fixed.
It was at this point that I became involved in the case on the initiative of Anthony Julius, of the London firm of solicitors Mishcon de Reya. I had never met him in person, but of course I knew of him through his high media profile as the solicitor who had won a record settlement for Princess Diana in her divorce from the Prince of Wales. Julius was not just a fashionable and successful lawyer. He was also well known as a writer and intellectual, although in the field of English literature rather than history. He was the author of a scholarly if controversial study of T. S. Eliot and antisemitism, and he wrote frequent book reviews for the Sunday papers. Julius was representing Deborah Lipstadt. When he phoned me toward the end of 1997, it was to ask if I would be willing to act as an expert witness for the defense.
Later, in his cramped and book-lined Holborn office, Julius explained to me in more detail what would be involved. The first duty of an expert witness, he said, was to the court. That is, the evidence had to be as truthful and objective as possible. Expert witnesses were not there to plead a case. They were there to help the court in technical and specialized matters. They had to give their own opinion, irrespective of which side had engaged them. They had to swear a solemn oath to tell the truth and could be prosecuted for perjury if they did not. On the other hand, they were usually commissioned by one side or the other in the belief that what they said would support the case being put rather than undermine it. At the end of the day, it was up to the lawyers whether or not they used the reports they had commissioned. I would be paid by the hour, not by results. So the money would have no influence on what I wrote or said. If I did agree to write an expert report, however, and it was accepted by the lawyers, then I could expect it to be presented to the court and I would have to attend the trial to be cross-examined on it by the plaintiff.
Why me? I asked. There were a number of reasons, Julius said. First, I was a specialist in modern German history. A copy of my most recent book in this field, Rituals of Retribution, was on his bookshelf. It was a large-scale study of capital punishment in Germany from the seventeenth century to the abolition of the death penalty in East Germany in 1987. Like much of my other work, it rested on unpublished manuscript documents in a range of German archives. So it was clear that I had a good command of the German language. I could read the obsolete German script in which many documents were written until the end of the Second World War. And I was familiar with the documentary basis on which a lot of modern German history was written. I had also for many years taught a document-based undergraduate course on Nazi Germany for the history degree at Birkbeck College in London University and before that in my previous post at the University of East Anglia. Clearly, the trial was going to turn to a considerable extent on the interpretation of Nazi documents, so expertise of this kind was crucial; and it was expertise that the court itself could not be expected to possess. Second, a couple of months earlier, I had published a short book entitled In Defense of History, which had dealt with such vexed questions as objectivity and bias in historical writing, the nature of historical research, the difference between truth and fiction, and the possibility of obtaining accurate knowledge about the past. These in a way, Anthony Julius explained, were the central issues in the case that Irving was bringing against Lipstadt.
What Anthony Julius wanted me to do was to advise the court on whether Lipstadt’s charges were justified. I was in a good position to do so not only because of my previous writings, but also because I had no personal connection with either of the two main protagonists in the case. Indeed, I had never actually seen either of them in the flesh. Irving was a famously combative figure, but he had never had occasion to cross swords with me. As I left Anthony Julius’s office, I tried to put together what was known about Irving’s reputation. Irving insisted that his works on the Second World War had a high standing and claimed in his libel suit that Lipstadt’s allegations had caused “damage to his reputation” in his “calling as an historian.”9 Yet as I began to plow through the reviews of Irving’s books written by a wide range of historians and journalists over the years, the case he made for his high reputation among academic reviewers began to crumble. Academic historians with a general knowledge of modern history had indeed mostly been quite generous to Irving, even where they had found reason to criticize him or disagree with his views. Paul Addison, for example, an expert on British history in the Second World War, had concluded that while Irving was “usually a Colossus of research, he is often a schoolboy in judgment.”10 Reviewing The War Path in 1978, R. Hinton Thomas, professor of German at Birmingham University, whose knowledge of the social and political context of twentieth-century German literature was both deep and broad, dismissed the book as “unoriginal” and its “claims to novelty” as “ill-based.”11 “Much of Irving’s argument,” wrote Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Churchill, about Hitler’s War in 1977, “is based on speculation.” But he also praised the book as “a scholarly work, the fruit of a decade of wide researches.”12 The military historian Sir Michael Howard, subsequently Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, praised on the other hand the “very considerable merits” of The War Path, and declared that Irving was “at his best as a professional historian demanding documentary proof for popularly-held beliefs.”13
In similar fashion, the eminent American specialist on modern Germany, Gordon A. Craig, reviewing Irving’s Goebbels in the New York Review of Books in 1996, seemed at first glance full of praise for Irving’s work:
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 energy as a researcher. . . . Hitler’s War . . . remains the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War, and, as such, indispensable for all students of that conflict. . . . It is always difficult for the non-historian to remember that there is nothing absolute about historical truth. What we consider as such is only an estimation, based upon what the best available evidence tells us. It must constantly be tested against new information and new interpretations that appear, however implausible they may be, or it will lose its vitality and degenerate into dogma or shibboleth. Such people as David Irving, then, have a indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views.14
Yet even reviewers who had praised “the depth of Irving’s research and his intelligence” found “too many avoidable mistakes . . . passages quoted without attribution and important statements not tagged to the listed sources.”15 John Charmley, a right-wing historian at the University of East Anglia, wrote that he “admires Mr. Irving’s assiduity, energy, and courage.” He continued: “Mr. Irving’s sources, unlike the conclusions which he draws from them, are usually sound.” But he also noted: “Mr. Irving is cited only when his sources have been checked and found reliable.”16
Historians with firsthand research experience and expertise in Irving’s field were more critical still. An early, prominent instance of criticism from such a quarter came with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s review of Hitler’s War in 1977. Trevor-Roper had worked in British Intelligence during the war and had been charged with heading an official mission to find out the true facts about the death of Hitler. The result of his researches, published in 1947 as The Last Days of Hitler, immediately established him as a leading authority on Nazi Germany and especially on Irving’s home territory of Hitler and his immediate personal entourage. Reviewing Hitler’s War, Trevor-Roper paid the by now customary tribute to Irving’s ingenuity and persistence as a researcher. “No praise,” he wrote, “can be too high for his indefatigable scholarly industry.” But this was immediately followed by devastating criticism of Irving’s method. Trevor-Roper continued:
When a historian relies mainly on primary sources, which we cannot easily check, he challenges our confidence and forces us to ask critical questions. How reliable is his historical method? How sound is his judgment? We ask these questions particularly of any man who, like Mr. Irving, makes a virtue–almost a profession–of using arcane sources to affront established opinions.
Trevor-Roper made it clear he found Irving’s method and judgment defective: “He may read his manuscript diaries correctly. But we can never be quite sure, and when he is most original, we are likely to be least sure.” Irving’s work, he concluded, had a “consistent bias.”17
The same view was taken by Martin Broszat, director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich when Irving published Hitler’s War. One of the world’s leading historians of Nazi Germany, Broszat began his critique of Hitler’s War by casting scorn on Irving’s much-vaunted list of archival discoveries. The evidence Irving had gathered from the reminiscences of Hitler’s entourage might provide more exact detail of what went on at Hitler’s wartime headquarters, he wrote, and it might convey something of the atmosphere of the place, but it did little to enlarge our knowledge of the important military and political decisions that Hitler took, and so did not live up to the claims Irving made for it. Broszat went much further, however, and included the allegation, backed up by detailed examples, that Irving had manipulated and misinterpreted original documents in order to prove his arguments.18 Equally critical was the American Charles W. Sydnor Jr., who at the time of writing his review had just completed a lengthy study, Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945, published by Princeton University Press. Sydnor’s thirty-page demolition of Irving’s book was one of the few reviews of any of Irving’s books for which the reviewer had manifestly undertaken a substantial amount of original research.19 Sydnor considered Irving’s boast to have outdone all other Hitler scholars in the depth and thoroughness of his research to be “pretentious twaddle.” He accused Irving of innumerable inaccuracies, distortions, manipulations, and mistranslations in his treatment of the documents.20
Peter Hoffmann, the world’s leading authority on the conservative resistance to Hitler and the individuals and groups behind the bomb plot of 20 July 1944, and a profound student of the German archival record of the wartime years, was equally critical of Irving’s biography of Hermann Göring, published in 1988:
Mr. Irving’s constant references to archives, diaries and letters, and the overwhelming amount of detail in his work, suggest objectivity. In fact they put up a screen behind which a very different agenda is transacted. . . . Mr. Irving is a great obfuscator. . . . Distortions affect every important aspect of this book to the point of obfuscation. . . . It is unfortunate that Mr. Irving wastes his extraordinary talents as a researcher and writer on trivializing the greatest crimes in German history, on manipulating historical sources and on highlighting the theatrics of the Nazi era.
Hoffmann commented that while the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War had “usefully provoked historians by raising the question of the smoking gun” (whether an order could be found from Hitler to perpetrate a holocaust against the Jews), twenty-two years on, so much research had been carried out in this area by historians that although he repeated it in Göring, “it is no longer possible to regard Mr. Irving’s thesis as a useful provocation.”21
John Lukács, an American historian who had written extensively on the Second World War, declared in a review of one of Irving’s books in 1981 that “Mr Irving’s factual errors are beyond belief.” He renewed his criticisms of Irving years later in a general survey of historical writings on Hitler.”22 “Few reviewers and critics of Irving’s books,” Lukács complained, not without some justification, “have bothered to examine them carefully enough.” Hitler’s War contained “many errors in names and dates; more important, unverifiable and unconvincing assertions abound.” There were references to archives “without dates, places, or file or page numbers.” “Many of the archival references in Irving’s footnotes . . . were inaccurate and did not prove or even refer to the pertinent statements in Irving’s text.” Lukács found many instances of Irving’s “manipulations, attributing at least false meanings to some documents or, in other instances, printing references to irrelevant ones.” Often “a single document, or fragment of a document, was enough for Irving to build a very questionable thesis on its contents or on the lack of such.” “While some of Irving’s ‘finds’ cannot be disregarded,” Lukács went on, “their interpretation . . . is, more often than not, compromised and even badly flawed.” He convicted Irving of “frequent ‘twisting’ of documentary sources” and urged “considerable caution” in their use by other historians.23
Similar conclusions were reached by Professor David Cannadine, currently director of the Institute of Historical Research at London University, when he came to consider the first volume of Irving’s biography of Sir Winston Churchill.24 Cannadine noted that the publishers to whom the book had originally been contracted (Michael Joseph in London and Doubleday in New York) had turned the manuscript down and it had been published by an unknown Australian company. “It has received almost no attention from historians or reviewers,” and, Cannadine added, “It is easy to see why.” Irving’s method was full of “excesses, inconsistencies and omissions.” Irving, he charged, “seems completely unaware of recent work done on the subject.” “It is not merely,” he observed, “that the arguments in this book are so perversely tendentious and irresponsibly sensationalist. It is also that it is written in a tone which is at best casually journalistic and at worst quite exceptionally offensive. The text is littered with errors from beginning to end.”25 In Cannadine’s judgment, too, therefore, Irving’s work was deeply flawed.
“Perversely tendentious,” “‘twisting’ of documentary sources,” “manipulating historical sources,” “pretentious twaddle”: these were unusually harsh criticisms emerging from the wider chorus of praise for Irving’s energy and persistence as a researcher. Clearly, Lipstadt was far from being the first critic of Irving’s work to accuse him of bending the documentary record to suit his arguments. For many years, professional historians had seemed to regard him as an assiduous collector of original documentation, although there was some dispute over quite how important all of it was. But when it came to Irving’s interpretation of the documents, several eminent specialists were harsh, even savage, in their criticisms. Nor was this all. Irving’s writings had repeatedly landed him in trouble with the law. He had been sued for libel by a retired naval officer who considered Irving’s charge of cowardice against him in The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 to be defamatory, and had been forced with his publishers to pay damages of £40,000, later confirmed by the House of Lords. The award, made in 1970, was very large for the time, and included £25,000 in exemplary damages, which can only be awarded when it has been shown that the defendant is guilty of a deliberate ‘tort’ or wrong committed with the object of making money. His allegation in the introduction to the German edition of Hitler’s War that the Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery had led to his publisher being forced to pay damages. In 1968 he had been sued for libel by Jillian Page, author of a newspaper article about him, as a result of his allegation that the article had been the result of her “fertile brain.” Irving had apologized in the High Court and paid costs on condition that Page agreed to withdraw the action. Similarly he had also been obliged to pay costs in an unsuccessful libel action against Colin Smythe, publisher of a book (The Assassination of Winston Churchill) attacking Irving’s views on the death of General Sikorski.26
During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Irving’s books had been published by a variety of mainstream publishing houses, including Penguin Books, who had brought out a paperback edition of the early version of Hitler’s War and its companion volume on the years 1933–39, The War Path; Macmillan, under whose imprint later editions of Hitler’s War had appeared up to about 1992; Hodder and Stoughton, who had published the original hardback; HarperCollins, whose paperback imprint Grafton Books had published an edition of Irving’s Göring biography in 1991; and Corgi paperbacks, who had produced more than one of the various editions of The Destruction of Dresden. Since the late 1980s, however, Irving had ceased to be published by major houses, but instead had brought out all his books under his own imprint, Focal Point. “If I write a bad book,” he said, perhaps rather surprisingly, in 1986, “or if I write two or three bad books, with boobs in it which the newspapers pick out, which I’m ashamed to admit are probably right, then of course the time comes when publishers turn their back on me.”27
Moreover, while he had run into the law at various points in his career, most notably in his arrest and deportation from Austria in 1983, his difficulties in this respect had increased noticeably during the 1990s, with his conviction for insulting the memory of the dead in Germany in 1991 and his banning from entry into that country, into Canada, and into Australia, all in 1992–93. One would not have expected a reputable historian to have run into such trouble, and indeed it was impossible to think of any historian of any standing at all who had been subjected to so many adverse legal judgments, or who had initiated so many libel actions himself. Irving’s reputation as a historian, never entirely secure, seemed to have plummeted during the 1990s. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum in the mid-1990s, Irving himself had admitted as much, confessing that his reputation among historians was “down to its uppers,” though adding that it “hasn’t yet worn through to the street.”28
Yet, because of his early reputation as a formidable historian, and because of his “articulate, plausible demeanor,” as the journalist Sarah Lyall pointed out, “Mr. Irving has confounded efforts to write him off as a harmless crackpot.”29 Jenny Booth, indeed, writing in The Scotsman, thought that Irving “was still seen as a substantial scholar in England and the US.”30 The right-wing historian Andrew Roberts noted that “several distinguished historians, all of whom asked not to be named, told me how much they admired Irving’s tenacity in uncovering new material from Nazi sources.”31
Yet such admiration was almost always highly qualified. Wolfgang Benz, director of Berlin’s Centre for the Study of Antisemitism, echoed the more dismissive tone of most German assessments of Irving’s reputation: “Irving,” he told an interviewer, “is overpraised as a writer for the general public. He has delivered details from the perspective of the keyhole–from conversations with courtiers and chauffeurs–and thereby mobilized the last knowledge that could be brought to light from Hitler’s entourage. But nothing really new.” The Irving of the early years had been an outsider who was to some extent to be taken seriously, Benz concluded, but he had subsequently radicalized his political views and could no longer be treated as a serious historian.32
A picture emerged, therefore, of a man who had left no stone unturned in his search for new documentation about Hitler and his role in the Third Reich, but whose use of that documentation raised many objections in the minds of those who knew the field well. Their criticisms raised real issues of objectivity, bias, and political motivation in the study of history that went far beyond the work of Irving himself. Yet Irving clearly insisted that his work was unimpeachably objective, describing himself as “an expert historian on the ‘Third Reich’; I have spent thirty years now working in the archives in London, in Washington, in Moscow–in short, around the world. (If I) express an opinion it’s probably a reasonable (sic) accurate opinion which I have arrived at, over a period of years.”33 In researching Hitler, he claimed to have
adopted strict criteria in selecting my source material. I have burrowed deep into the contemporary writings of his closest personal staff, seeking clues to the real truth in diaries and private letters written to wives and friends. For the few autobiographical works I have used I have preferred to rely on their original manuscripts rather than the printed texts, as in the early postwar years apprehensive publishers (especially the “licensed” ones in Germany) made drastic changes in them. . . . But historians are quite incorrigible, and will quote any apparently primary source no matter how convincingly its pedigree is exposed.34
Irving argued in the introduction to the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War that other historians had been almost uniformly “idle” in their attitude to the sources and that therefore everyone else’s work on Hitler was unreliable.35
He listed a whole variety of diaries and other sources on which he claimed previous historians had relied, and which he himself had exposed as falsifications. All these falsifications, he argued, were to the disadvantage of Hitler. Yet his “idle predecessors” in writing about Hitler had failed to detect them.36 “Each successive biographer” of Hitler, he declared in 1977, “has repeated or engrossed the legends created by his predecessors, or at best consulted only the most readily available works of reference themselves.”37 They had never bothered to visit the surviving relatives of leading Nazis to search for additional material. And they never troubled to consult the most basic documentation. In a debate held in 1978 in the German town of Aschaffenburg, Irving attacked establishment historians for allegedly simply copying out of each other’s books, while he was the only Hitler specialist who actually consulted the original sources.38
Historians were inveterately lazy. “A lot of us, when we see something in handwriting, well, we hurriedly flip to another folder where it’s all neatly typed out. . . . But I’ve trained myself to take the line of most resistance and I go for the handwriting.”39 Most historians, he averred, only quoted each other when it came to Hitler’s alleged part in the extermination of the Jews. “For thirty years our knowledge of Hitler’s part in the atrocity had rested on inter-historian incest.”40 Thus Irving contemptuously almost never cited, discussed, or used the work of other historians in his own books. Irving was evidently very proud of his personal collection of thousands of documents and index cards on the history of the Third Reich. He pointed out that he was “well known for providing every assistance to and answering the queries of his colleagues, regardless of their attitude to his works,” and that he had made his research materials generally available for historical study at the German Federal Archives and at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.41 Irving’s selfassessment spurred Neal Ascherson, normally a sober-minded journalist, to pen some remarkably purple prose. Irving’s reputation as a collector of documents was unparalleled:
This is a shadowy underworld, hidden beneath the clean, bright places where scholars write books. Down in the cellar of Third Reich studies, con men and SS veterans, obsessive journalists and forgers and real historians stumble about in echoes of fantastic rumour. And here Irving is a dark prince: His special gift is finding papers which others don’t even know how to look for.42
This was an unduly romantic view, however, which accepted too much of Irving’s own assiduously propagated self-image at face-value. Whatever Ascherson might have thought, historians did not always work in ‘clean, bright places’ like the British Library or the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, any more than Irving has avoided such places in his own search for documents. Many historians had surely shared experiences like my own, when I discovered major collections of documents in attics in two different German cities in the course of researching for my doctorate, and had to endure difficult conditions in going through them. Almost all historians have come across sources untouched by any other historian since they had been filed away by those who compiled them. Irving had no monopoly on such research. Historians have always been obliged to get their hands dirty.
There were hundreds of historians–German, British, American, Israeli, Swiss, French, Dutch, Canadian and so on–who had researched the subjects with which Irving concerned himself.43 The major documentary collections had been generally available to historians for decades. Already in the immediate aftermath of the war, Allied war crimes prosecutors had sifted through tons of captured German documents to prepare their indictments in the Nuremberg Trials. Many of these had been printed in the published record of the trials. The eventual return of the original documents, many times more voluminous than the printed selection, to the German Federal Archives, had provided the stimulus for a massive new research effort, spearheaded by Munich’s Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History). Since then, vast new masses of documents, both official and private in provenance, had become available to scholars in a variety of public state archives in Germany and other countries. This was not an area of history like, say, the fifth century, when historians had to make do with sparse and obscure source material to reconstruct what happened. Historians of the Third Reich and the Second World War were more in danger of drowning in a sea of sources.
Moreover, perhaps because he had not gone through such training himself, Irving seemed not to realize that the training of a professional historian in Germany, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere had long been based on the Ph.D., which required proof of mastery of all the necessary techniques of archival research and historical investigation based on original documents. From the 1960s onwards, generations of Ph.D. students from many countries had descended upon the German archives and the microfilmed editions of captured German documents available in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Imperial War Museum, and elsewhere, and produced a mass of published research into the history of Germany under Nazism and during the Second World War that, four decades later, was almost overwhelming. The techniques of documentary investigation in which Irving presented himself as the master were in fact a normal part of the stock-in-trade of every trainee professional historian. Of course, Irving had discovered new documents and obtained new evidence, for example, by interviewing surviving eyewitnesses of the time. But this was true of a vast number of other historians too. The difference was that professional historians did not make such a fetish of it. Irving’s attitude toward new sources seemed more like that of a journalist pulling off a scoop than a professional historian just doing his job. New discoveries in this field were quite normal. Such was the vastness of the documentary legacy left by Nazi Germany–twelve years in the life of a major, modern industrial state–that much of the archival record still remained to be worked through at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Historians also had to rely on each other’s work. There was nothing wrong with this, where the work relied on conformed to the accepted canons of scholarly research and rested on thorough, transparent, and unbiased investigation of the primary sources. So vast was the material with which historians dealt, so numerous were the subjects they covered, so consuming of time, energy, and financial resources was the whole process of historical research, that it would be completely impossible for new historical discoveries and insights to be generated if every historian had to go back to the original sources for everything he or she wanted to say. This need to rely on each other’s work had nothing to do with copying or plagiarism: on the contrary, the conventions of scholarship ensured that footnotes and other references were used in scholarly historical work to pinpoint precisely where the historian had obtained information, and to allow the reader to check up on this if so desired.
Irving’s refusal to consult the work of other historians was disturbing, therefore. More disturbing still, however, was an incident I recalled from Robert Harris’s (nonfiction) book Selling Hitler. In 1983–the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor–the respected German weekly Stern serialized extracts from what its reporters claimed were diaries written by Hitler and recently made available from East German sources. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), acting for Times Newspapers, declared them to be authentic after a hasty perusal of the manuscripts in a Swiss bank vault. As a result, serialization of an English translation began in The Sunday Times. Confronted with doubts about the diaries’ authenticity from a number of historians, Stern organized a press conference on 25 April.
Irving had come into contact with the diaries through August Priesack, an old Nazi who had been one of the first to be approached by the forger in his quest for authentication. Irving himself had purchased some eight hundred pages of Hitler documents that emanated from the same forger in October 1982 and had been on the verge of selling them to Macmillan when he had begun to have doubts. Priesack’s collection of Nazi memorabilia was full of obvious forgeries. This made it overwhelmingly likely that the ‘diaries’ were forgeries too. Funded by rival newspapers who wished to preserve their circulation in the face of a threatened Sunday Times scoop, Irving appeared in person at the Stern press conference and denounced them as fakes. “I know the collection from which these diaries come,” he shouted across the crowded floor. “It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here.” Within a short time he had been proved right. The diaries were quickly shown by tests carried out by the German Federal Archives on the ink and paper to be postwar products. Their author, Konrad Kujau, was eventually sent to prison for his offense.44
Irving subsequently portrayed his role in this affair as evidence of his unrivaled expertise on the original source material for Hitler and the Third Reich.45 Thus while eminent academics had authenticated them, he proved his superior knowledge of the original documents by recognizing them for what they were–a crude fake. Yet, one reason why the forgery got as far as being printed as authentic in the national press was the fact that eminent academics had not been allowed near them. There were those who had, like the American historian Gerhard Weinberg and the Stuttgart expert on Hitler, Eberhard Jäckel, expressed grave suspicions almost from the very start. Even Hugh Trevor-Roper had changed his mind about them immediately after he had sent off his article authenticating them to the Sunday Times, and had used the Stern press conference, much to the discomfiture of the organizers, to give voice to his newfound skepticism.46
Moreover, what Irving subsequently conveniently forgot to mention was that a couple of days after the press conference, he had changed his mind. According to Robert Harris, he did this because he was uncomfortable at being aligned with majority, respectable historical opinion, because he was impressed by the sheer size of the diaries–sixty volumes–which seemed almost beyond the capacity of any one individual to forge, and because, having finally seen the diaries for himself, they looked more convincing than he had expected. “Finally,” added Harris, “there was the fact that the diaries did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust.” Indeed, all the way through, they seemed to give a favorable impression of Hitler. Whereas most historians held Hitler responsible for the antisemitic pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, for example, the diaries showed him ordering a stop to it as soon as he found out about it. Whereas most historians thought the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in 1941 the act of a madman, the diaries revealed him to have been acting on Hitler’s orders in pursuit of a genuine peace mission. On point after point, the diaries seemed to endorse Irving’s rose-colored view of the Führer.47
Soon Irving was on the front page of The Times declaring his belief in the diaries’ authenticity. When forensic tests shortly afterwards revealed them definitively as fakes, Irving issued a statement accepting the finding but drawing attention to the fact that he had been the first person to unmask them as forged. “Yes,” said a reporter from The Times when this was read to him, “and the last person to declare them authentic.”48 According to Harris, therefore, Irving’s documentary expertise was by no means as flawless or unbiased as he liked people to think it was. He seemed troublingly inclined to apply it in a way that all too obviously suited his own particular interests and ideas.
During the 1990s, Irving described himself as waging an “International Campaign for Real History.” “My version of Real History,” he conceded in 1992, “may be wrong History!”–and he continued:
I am not so arrogant as to say “thou shalt have no other version of history but mine.” . . . Nobody has the right to stand up and say, only my version of history is right: all other versions are wrong: and nobody has the right to propagate alternative versions. . . . And that’s what I say about my book Hitler’s War; it may be right, it may be wrong! But is certainly a magisterial work . . . a book which makes my rivals livid with envy and rage.49
Yet Irving claimed on so many occasions that he had discovered the objective truth about Nazi Germany, and the professional historians had not done so, that his concession that he might be wrong could not really be taken seriously, unless it was taken to apply only to minor matters of detail. Asked in 1993 whether he was a partisan historian, he replied:
Every historian has to be selective: If I write a biography about Adolf Hitler, then the archives have got about ten tons of documents on Adolf Hitler, and you have to select which documents you present. And if you’re a Jewish historian, you present the facts one way, because they have an agenda to present. I don’t have any kind of political agenda, and really, it’s rather defamatory for people to suggest that I do have an agenda. The agenda I have, I suppose, is, all right, I admit it, I like seeing the other historians with egg on their face. And they’re getting a lot of egg on their face now, because I’m challenging them to produce the evidence for what they’ve been saying for fifty years.50
Irving did not appear to believe that other historians could rise to this challenge. Rather, he believed that there was an international campaign orchestrated by the “Jewish community” (“our traditional enemies”) in many countries to stop him from telling the truth. “My duty as an historian,” he told the Munich court that rejected his appeal against conviction for denying the Holocaust on 5 May 1992, “is to establish the truth.”51 “Our traditional enemies refuse to debate me,” he told an audience in Canada on 1 November 1992; “they can’t debate me.” Describing his continuing International Campaign for Real History, he went on:
It is the word real that frightens my opponents, because they have got away with it now for the last fifty years, with their Madison-avenue, their Hollywood versions of history, their television versions of history. Real history is what we find in the archives, and it frightens my opponents because it takes the planks out from beneath their feet.52
Irving actually was saying that in crucial respects all other versions of the history of the Second World War apart from his own were wrong, because they were not based on “what we find in the archives.” Only ‘Real History’, history as he practiced it, was correct.
It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that he objected to Lipstadt’s charges of falsification. Lipstadt’s book had only sold two thousand copies in the United Kingdom up to the moment of the trial, so it had hardly done very widespread damage to Irving’s reputation or even, indeed, given significant publicity to his work.53 This was I thought one reason why Irving tried to widen the case by arguing that Lipstadt was part of conspiracy to suppress his work and deny him access to major publishing outlets. He alleged in support of his writ that she had “pursued a sustained malicious vigorous well-funded and reckless world-wide campaign of personal defamation” against him. Irving claimed from the outset that the central issue in the trial was freedom of speech–his freedom of speech, that is, not Deborah Lipstadt’s. Orchestrated by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, individuals and organizations in many countries, he suggested, had conspired to have his books rejected by mainstream publishers, his speeches cancelled, his entry permits denied. He had been expelled from Canada and fined in Germany. He and his family had been subjected to threats and abuse. All of this he put down to the fact that he was telling the truth about Hitler, the Germans, and the gas chambers, and the Jews wanted to stop him from being heard. They were the ones who had lied about the past, and they were too cowardly to defend their lies in open debate.
Despite complaints about losing his livelihood because of the refusal of reputable publishers to print his books, Irving could not resist boasting about the “astonishingly good economics” of producing them himself under his Focal Point imprint and distributing them by the simple means of taking them to bookshops in a lorry. “I get the author’s cut, the publisher’s cut and the distributor’s cut,” he bragged. In addition he offered his books for sale through the Internet and via the so-called Institute for Historical Review.54 Still, he may well have been right to argue that he could have sold far more had he continued to publish his work through major publishing houses as he had done in the 1970s and 1980s.
Such claims led a number of commentators to voice a certain sympathy with Irving’s predicament. Thus Anne Sebba, in The Times Higher Education Supplement, expressed the fear before the trial that it would lead to some kind of censorship. “Legitimate scholars must be allowed to speak and write the truth as they see it without fear of personal attack. To stifle free-ranging debate is good neither for academics nor for the rest of us.”55 But who was trying to stifle free-ranging debate here? Wasn’t it Irving who was trying to silence his critics by bringing a libel suit against one of their number? An astonishing number of commentators seemed to forget this rather basic point as they sharpened their pens in defense of free speech. Some even appeared to think that it was Irving himself who was on trial. John Mason, writing in the Financial Times, thought that the issues raised by the case included “when are the ideas of historians or academics so appalling (that) their work should be forever banned?” and “whether, or where, one limits free speech.”56 “Oldfashioned liberals,” proclaimed Martin Mears sympathetically in the legal pages of The Times, “uphold his right to express any view no matter how odious”; and he went on for three half-columns to deliver a thundering justification of freedom of expression, as if it was the defense in the case that threatened it and not Irving.57 “It would be sad,” added the journalist Peter Millar, who had accompanied Irving on his trip to Moscow in 1992 to get a copy of the Goebbels diaries, “if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable.”58 Many people, including distinguished colleagues in the historical profession, seemed to think I was appearing for Irving when I told them I was acting in the trial as an expert witness for the defense. The Guardian newspaper slipped on one occasion and referred to Irving’s side as “the defence.”59 An American commentator appeared to believe that Deborah Lipstadt was attempting to put David Irving in prison.60
A number of commentators seemed to think that it was Lipstadt’s publisher, Penguin Books, who were pursuing Irving and not the other way round. “Penguin,” according to Irving’s collaborator on a book in the 1960s, the retired Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, Donald Cameron Watt, “was certainly out for blood.”61 That it was he who was being hunted, not Lipstadt or Penguin, was Irving’s own line, here taken over lock, stock, and barrel by Watt. “They are out to ruin me,” Irving said: “They want to take my work from me, my reputation and my home.”62 Irving reminded reporters that he had offered to settle the case out of court for a payment of £500 and an apology from the publishers.63 Yet the offer, made 11 September 1998, included the demand that Penguin withdraw the book and issue a full apology. It was only in his second offer of settlement, on 14 October 1999, that he dropped these other conditions also extended to Lipstadt.
Penguin Books were not “out for blood,” as Cameron Watt claimed. For what were they supposed to do in the face of a libel suit that threatened them with huge expenses, the withdrawal of one of their books, and the prevention of the publication by them or anyone else of any work containing the least breath of criticism of Irving and his fellow Holocaust deniers? No responsible publisher could afford to back down, least of all the publisher who had risked so much in defending previous publications such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Satanic Verses from censorship or worse. Any publisher would have the moral duty to stand by an author in the face of such a threat. And no publisher who ratted on its authors in such circumstances could hope for much sympathy from the literary world in the future. So this was not just a moral stand on Penguin’s part, it was a commercial decision too.64
In any case, Penguin’s withdrawal would still have left Lipstadt in the firing line. Irving was never likely to make an acceptable offer of settlement to Deborah Lipstadt. For she, rather than her publisher, was the real object of his venom, and there was no way he was going to settle with her. For Irving, Lipstadt was the pointed end of the conspiracy he believed had been working for years to destroy his reputation. Penguin, by contrast, were his former publishers, against whom he had no specific grudge to pay off, either real or imagined. “They wanted a scrap,” Irving told Michael Horsnell of The Times, “so I gave them one. I had to take action.”65 The ‘they’ were not Penguin, of course, but the Jewish organizations whom Irving termed the “traditional enemies of truth.”
Some commentators therefore placed the responsibility for the action not on Penguin’s shoulders but on Deborah Lipstadt’s. Stuart Nicolson, writing in The Scotsman, noted that Irving had become “the ultimate hate figure” to people like Lipstadt, who reviled him “as a malign force intent on wiping the horrors of Auschwitz and other death camps from the pages of history.”66 Jonathan Freedland, author of some of the most thoughtful reflections on the trial, claimed in The Guardian that Irving
could have been ignored. The decision to take him on instead, at enormous cost, is typical of a strong current in contemporary Holocaust thinking: the desire to defeat “revisionism” once and for all. The sentiment is keenest in America. Indeed, it’s telling that it was US Jewry which wanted to do battle with Irving in a London court: British Jews were wary of handing him a free platform. But the Americans prevailed, as they nearly always do when it comes to the Shoah.67
Freedland was not the only commentator who thought this way. Jürgen Krönig, the London correspondent of the respected German weekly Die Zeit, wrote: “The fact that things came to trial is in the end the consequence of the determination above all of Jewish-American groups to wrestle down the deniers of the Holocaust and their ‘revisionism.’ ” Lipstadt’s book itself was part of this “offensive procedure,” according to Krönig, who noted that Lipstadt had added more material on Irving to the first draft of her manuscript when Yehuda Bauer, of the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel, had pointed out to her that it had neglected the man he regarded as the principal representative of Holocaust denial in Western Europe. If the Israeli and American Jewish communities had ignored the Holocaust deniers rather than gone on the offensive against them, Krönig suggested, then the trial would never have begun.68
Perhaps the most trenchant expression of this point of view came from the British historian John P. Fox, writing in the Independent on Sunday on 30 January 2000. Fox attacked what he called “Jewish racism” which, he thought, was one of “the political and cultural purposes which lay behind the American and Israeli Jewish ‘management’ of the Holocaust over the past 40 years.” “The Holocaust,” Fox alleged, was an “emotional catch-all term” which he had “long argued” should be abandoned in favor of a more neutral description of the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews. Fox thought that belief in the uniqueness and preeminence of Jewish suffering as symbolized by the term ‘Holocaust’ had “become the touchstone, in certain areas and respects, of free speech and intellectual honesty” for “whether some historians or writers are deemed acceptable for entry into the fold of the chosen,” whatever that might be. Rejection of the idea of uniqueness meant “you are excluded and damned to hell in your profession,” which he regarded as “nothing less than intellectual fascism.” The claim that he had long argued for the abandonment of the term ‘Holocaust’ was surprising in view of the fact that Fox had been the founder of the British Journal of Holocaust Education and continued to edit it until 1995. Evidently, however, he had changed his views since then, for Irving announced his intention of calling him as a witness on behalf of his case against Lipstadt, and he seemed to be willing to appear, although in the end he never testified.
Even some Jews took this line, or at least a more moderate version of it. The German-Jewish historian Julius Schoeps agreed with an interviewer, Ulrike Herrmann, who put to him the claim that “this trial happened in the end because there was an attempt at an offensive strike against Irving and his denial of the Holocaust.” This Schoeps believed was a problematical tactic, since it allowed the court to become a public forum for Holocaust denial, and what he saw as the defense’s aim of shutting Irving up had failed. Instead, he had once more found a worldwide audience. In the end, thought Schoeps, it would have been better to have ignored him.69 So too did others, and there was at least one observer who considered that the whole trial would provide nothing but free propaganda for Irving.70 For the first time in many years, he would be at the center of things, addressing not a tiny huddle of neo-Nazis but a worldwide audience.71 Other German commentators shared this view.72 But they were writing, of course, in a country where the central facts of the Nazi extermination of the Jews were legally defined as indisputable and where Holocaust denial was a criminal offense. Things were, and are, very different in Britain. Lipstadt and her publisher were not letting the genie out of the bottle when they decided to defend the action. It was out already.
After plowing through a lot of this journalism, I had to pinch myself to recall that it was Irving who had launched the court case; Irving who was attempting to silence his critics; Irving who wanted a book withdrawn from circulation and pulped, its author and publisher ordered to pay him damages and costs, and undertakings given that the criticisms they made of his work should never be repeated. Defending yourself in these circumstances is a necessity, not a matter of choice. “Short of apologising on bended knee to a Nazi sympathiser,” as Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian, “Lipstadt had no choice but to defend herself in court.”73 Who, in the end, was advocating censorship here: the people like Lipstadt, who automatically assumed that it was legitimate to write freely about such matters, or the London correspondent of Die Zeit, who evidently thought that people should keep silent about them? The view that the writ could somehow have been ignored was untenable, whatever Lipstadt’s own political convictions or those of her American supporters might have been: a writ is a writ, and it will not go away just because those on whom it is served refuse to respond to it.
Moreover, Irving had other libel actions in progress, or threatened, at the same time. Most particularly, he was suing the journalist Gitta Sereny and The Observer newspaper for an article alleging in terms not dissimilar to those employed by Lipstadt that he falsified the historical record. Irving’s use of the British libel laws to deter criticism of his work was made clear by his reaction to criticisms of his work, already mentioned, in John Lukács’s book The Hitler of History, first published in the United States. On 25 October 1997 Irving wrote to Lukács’s American publishers telling them that he considered the book “libellous” and adding: “A major British Sunday newspaper was obliged to pay me very substantial damages for similar libels eighteen months ago.” He followed this up on 28 October 1997 with a letter to Lukács’s British agents asking them if they would “in their own interests, inform any prospective British publisher of the risks attendant on publishing this work in an unamended form. . . . I put you, and through your agency any such publisher, herewith on notice that I shall immediately commence libel proceedings against any publisher who is foolish enough to repeat these libels within the jurisdictions of our courts.” Among the statements by Lukács that Irving declared defamatory were his claims in the book that “almost all of Irving’s references . . . must be considered with caution,” his accusation that (in Irving’s words) Irving was “an apologist, rehabilitator, and unrepentant admirer of Adolf Hitler,” and that his books engaged in “twisting and manipulating documentary evidence . . . falsifying citations and references . . . inventing historical sources or printing non-existent archival numbers, and . . . making up quotations.”74 Up to the point when the trial began, Lukács’s book had not been published in Britain, although he was a well-known author, the topic was eminently marketable, and several of his previous works had found British publishers.
The English law of defamation is uniquely loaded in favor of the plaintiff. As Anthony Julius explained, all that the plaintiff had to do was to show that the defendant had published statements that on the face of it were damaging to his or her reputation or honor. Unlike in American law, where the First Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, no further burden of proof was placed upon the plaintiff. In the United States, a plaintiff who was a public figure–a very broad category–had to show both falsity and malice on the part of the author of the objectionable statements. In English law, however, such statements could be made in good faith, and unless the defendant succeeded in establishing a positive defense, they could still be deemed libelous. There were generally only three possible lines of defense. The first was to dispute the meaning of the statements to which the defendant objected. The second was to admit their meaning but deny that they were defamatory, or in other words to deny that they damaged the plaintiff’s reputation. Neither of these lines seemed open to the defense in this particular case. Lipstadt’s clear and unambiguous prose left no room for doubt on the first score, and although Irving’s reputation wasn’t quite as unsullied as he claimed it to be, still, sufficient numbers of historians and, more important perhaps, ordinary book-buying readers considered him to be a serious writer about Hitler and the Second World War, whatever their reservations about some aspects of his work, that a blanket statement that he falsified the historical record was bound to have an adverse effect on his standing. Moreover, Irving was able to rely on the presumption in English law that he was entitled to a good reputation unless and until the defense proved otherwise.
A third line of defense remained. This was to claim justification, or in other words to prove that the statements in Lipstadt’s book were true. That the entire burden of doing this rested on the defense was what, in effect, stacked the cards in favor of the plaintiff. For the law assumed that defamatory statements were lies unless proven otherwise. Proving that Lipstadt was telling the truth was going to be a difficult, complicated, and time-consuming business. The strategy that Julius and his team, backed by Penguin’s solicitors Davenport Lyons, unfolded was three-pronged. First, it involved commissioning professional historians to provide expert reports to the court presenting the evidence for the gassing facilities at Auschwitz, for the mass murder itself, for the existence of a co-ordinated Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews, and for the involvement of Hitler in this operation. Regrettable though it was, there was clearly something to be said for ensuring that most of them were not Jewish, since Irving would undoubtedly try to make something out of it if they were. Assembling a range of experts from various countries–Britain, the United States, Germany, and Holland–would also indicate the international dimensions of recent and current research on modern German history and the Nazi period, and further counter any suggestion that such research was mainly carried out by one particular ethnic group or nationality.
We obtained the agreement of Robert Jan Van Pelt, author of a standard work on Auschwitz, to deliver a report on the evidence for the existence and use of gassing facilities at the camp. Christopher Browning, an eminent specialist in the history of the extermination and the policies that led to it, agreed to write a report on the evidence for the extermination of the Jews on a wider scale. Peter Longerich, a German, formerly of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History and now teaching at Royal Holloway College in the University of London, who had just completed a massively documented overview of the making of Nazi policies toward the Jews between 1933 and 1945, was commissioned to provide reports on the evidence for Hitler’s antisemitism and the systematic nature of the killings. In all cases the emphasis was to be on the original documentation of various kinds that provided the basis for historical knowledge. Where necessary, the experts were to deal at length with criticisms leveled at the authenticity or reliability of such accounts, although in the end this only proved to be necessary in the case of Auschwitz. The overall purpose of these reports was not to show what had actually happened, though in the end there was no doubt that they went a long way toward doing precisely that. The purpose, rather, was to put before the court the evidence which any fair-minded, objective commentator would have to take into account in writing about these issues. This evidence in turn provided the basis for the defense’s argument that Irving was neither objective nor fair-minded in his treatment of these issues.
The second prong of the three-pronged defense was to commission experts to document Irving’s political views and his connections with far-right, neo-fascist, and extremist political organizations. This was important because Lipstadt had referred to these in her book and alleged that Irving distorted historical evidence, as Irving put it in his “Statement of Claim,” “essentially in order (to) serve his own reprehensible purposes ideological leanings and/or political agenda.” Reports were duly commissioned from experts on the far right in Britain, Germany, and the United States, although in the end only the German report, by Hajo Funke, professor of politics at the Free University of Berlin, was formally presented to the court.
This left the third prong of the defense, and this is where I came in. What Julius and his team wanted me to do was to go through Irving’s work, or at least a sample of it large enough to be representative, and write a report on whether or not Lipstadt’s allegation that he falsified the historical record was justified. Clearly the lawyers expected that the answer contained in the report would be in the affirmative. But as I told them early on, there was no guarantee. I was not familiar with Irving’s work. Apart from what I already knew from reading critics like Sydnor or Broszat, I had little idea of what I would find.
There was certainly no lack of material on which to base my report. First and most important were Irving’s published books, thirty or more of them, a number of them available in numerous editions. Many if not most of them could easily be consulted both in English and in German in different versions in libraries in Britain and Germany, although some proved rather hard to track down. I was startled to find that the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War could only be read at the desk in the Rare Books Room of the British Library reserved for literature deemed by the library to be pornographic. Second, Irving had also published a smaller number of articles, most of them edited versions of speeches, mainly in The Journal of Historical Review, which were also available for public inspection in institutions such as the Wiener Library. Third, Irving maintained an extensive website on the Internet (http://fpp.co.uk) which posted the edited texts of various of his speeches, together with a large quantity of other material revealing of his views on the history of the Third Reich.
But there was clearly more that was not generally available at all. This was where the legal process checked in. As Irving remarked in 1991,
The first thing that happens in a libel action is this: only a few weeks after you’ve served a writ on a gentleman there comes a very expensive stage for both parties known as Discovery. The word ‘Discovery’ written with a capital ‘D’, just like the word ‘Holocaust’ written with a capital ‘H’. Only this time the word is on my side. Because Discovery is an ugly phase, for plaintiff and defendant, when you face each other across a lawyer’s table, at the choosing of the Plaintiff, and you say, “I want to see your documents and you can see mine.” And at that stage usually all the defendants crack up and cop out.75
In the present case, however, the defense did not “cop out,” and Irving was obliged to disclose an enormous mass of material in addition to the list of documents he initially agreed to supply. In a series of interim actions, Anthony Julius went to a High Court official known as the Master of the Queen’s Bench, whose task it was to deal with the case until the trial judge took over at the beginning of the formal public proceedings, and applied for Court Orders to force Irving to disclose all the material in his possession that was relevant to the defense case. Irving kept a vast private archive of his speeches, letters, and other documents. Clearly all of this was relevant to questions such as Irving’s contacts with neo-fascists and political extremists and could be highly revealing of his private views on history and politics as well as those expressed before public and–even more important–closed meetings of his supporters. It might well be the case that, for example, he was relatively scrupulous in his treatment of his historical evidence in his books, but far less so in his speeches and interviews.
These Discovery actions were successful. As a result I gained access, as did the other expert witnesses, to many videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving’s speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, his complete private diaries, thousands of letters, and a great deal of other material, including the notes he had taken while collecting historical documents, preparing drafts of his books, and interviewing surviving members of Hitler’s entourage. As all of this piled up in the lawyers’ offices, it soon became apparent that the amount of material available was too vast for me to master in the relatively short space of time I had available before the deadline for submitting the reports, especially given my other commitments such as my regular academic work.
I was fortunate therefore that the lawyers agreed that I could use the research assistance of two of my Ph.D. students, Nikolaus Wachsmann, who subsequently became a Junior Research Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, and Thomas Skelton-Robinson, who moved from London in 1998 to research for a Ph.D. at Churchill College, Cambridge. Both had first-class honors degrees in History (from the London School of Economics and from Glasgow University respectively), both had a first-rate command of German, and both had a good knowledge of twentieth-century German history. Nik had been working for some time on state prisons and penitentiaries in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and had already made himself familiar with many German archives; Thomas had recently started research on the West German government’s policy toward the student movement in the late 1960s. Both of them agreed to put aside their research for a few months to work on the Irving material. Neither of them, probably, realized at the outset just how time-consuming it was to be, nor quite how important their work was to prove.
The two researchers compiled transcripts of the salient parts of the audiocassettes and videotapes and went through this and the other material supplied by Irving during the process of Discovery, taking extensive notes. Meanwhile I set to work going through Irving’s major books, above all Hitler’s War in its 1977 and 1991 editions, and the biographies of Göring and Goebbels. During the period January 1998 to April 1999, we met frequently, exchanged notes and drafts, and discussed what to do next. At various points, too, Nik and Thomas undertook research in German archives and libraries and we engaged in a considerable amount of correspondence. German archivists were enormously helpful, often faxing vital documents at very short notice; we also obtained material from Moscow, from Washington, and, during the trial itself, from Israel, where the government was persuaded to release the lengthy autobiography that Adolf Eichmann wrote before his execution there in 1961.
Before we started work, few historians had actually gone to the trouble of subjecting any of Irving’s publications to a detailed analysis by taking his historical statements and claims and tracing them back to the original and other sources on which he claimed they rest. Doing so was an extremely time-consuming exercise, and most historians had better things to do with their time. Historians assumed that the work of fellowhistorians, or those who purported to be fellow-historians, was reliable in its footnoting, in its translations and summaries of documents, and in its treatment of the evidence at a basic level. They might make mistakes and errors of fact, but they did not generally deliberately manipulate and distort documents, suppress evidence that ran counter to their interpretations, wilfully mistranslate documents in a foreign language, consciously use unreliable or discredited testimony when it suited their purpose, falsify historical statistics, or apply one standard of criticism to sources that undermined their views and another to those that supported them. These were the kinds of things that Lipstadt claimed Irving had done. But she had not mentioned any specific examples. So we had to start from scratch. Since what was stake was a general allegation, or series of allegations, it was not necessary to confine ourselves either to the works Lipstadt had read by Irving–which were understandably few, given the very marginal position that Irving’s work occupied in her analysis–or to what Irving had said or written before the publication of Lipstadt’s book in Britain in 1994. The whole of his oeuvre was at our disposal.
Deciding on these matters was by no means an easy task. It raised very large questions of historical epistemology as well as demanding the minute examination of very small pieces of empirical evidence. For historians often disagreed with one another, and scholarly disagreements often involved accusations of misreading or neglecting sources, or stretching interpretations beyond what the evidence seemed to allow. How was it going to be possible to distinguish between interpretation and fantasy, argument and tendentiousness, imaginative readings of the sources and outright manipulations of them, minor errors of fact and deliberate distortions of the documents, or the accidental omission of relevant material and the deliberate suppression of inconvenient evidence?
This task was, in a sense, made easier by Irving’s repeated insistence that he was not putting forward an argument for debate, but simply telling the truth. His philosophy of history was revealed in a press conference held in Brisbane, Australia, on 20 March 1986:
JOURNALIST: It could be argued, couldn’t it, that history is always subjective, and your view of history too.
IRVING: Oh yes. Look at the life of Rommel here, the life of Rommel, The Trail of the Fox. In writing that, I used two thousand letters that he wrote to his wife over his entire life. . . . Well, two thousand letters, that manuscript was probably six hundred pages long when it was finally (completed), you’re doing a lot of condensing, you’re condensing an entire man’s life into six hundred pages of typescript, and that process of condensing it is the nice way of saying, “but of course you’re selecting, you’re selecting how to present this man.” And that is undoubtedly a subjective operation. And this is why I hope that the readers look at the overall image presented of David Irving by the media and they think to themselves: “Well, on balance we can probably trust him better than we can trust Professor Hillgruber, or Professor Jacobsen, or any of the other historians who write on the same kind of period.”76
JOURNALIST: Surely the same argument that you’re putting up against the bulk of historians could be levelled at you.
IRVING: Ah, but then, you see, but this is the difference: they can’t prove their points, they can’t prove their points. I can prove all my points because I’ve got all the documents and the evidence on my side, but they can’t find even one page of evidence to attack me, and that is why they’re beginning to rant and rave instead.77
In other words, Irving admitted a degree of aesthetic subjectivity in condensing and organizing his material, but conceded none at all in formulating his arguments (or, as he would put it, proving his points). Yet this still left a good deal of room for him to maneuver. In particular, even if we identified numerous factual errors in his work, deciding whether these were the result of mere carelessness, on the one hand, or deliberate falsification on the other, was obviously going to be no easy matter. For how exactly could you prove that someone had deliberately falsified the historical record? Wasn’t it all a matter of interpretation anyway?
Precisely such issues were what made the case so fascinating for me. It raised in an acute and at the same time practical form many of the problems with which I had been wrestling in my book In Defense of History. For both myself and my researchers, the intellectual principles at stake were the most important ones as we began our work. It was not a political trial. In many ways Lipstadt seemed as politically committed to her cause as Irving was to his. Yet in the end, political commitment should not interfere with historical research and writing. Certainly there were many historians who had strong views on a variety of political issues. It was not realistic to demand that they keep their politics out of their work. The real test of a serious historian was the extent to which he or she was willing or able to subordinate political belief to the demands of historical research. Documents and other kinds of historical evidence often threw up things that fitted uncomfortably with one’s political beliefs. Both Lipstadt and Irving insisted that they were objective historians. Discovering whether or not Lipstadt’s accusation that Irving falsified the record in the interests of his political beliefs became a test case of whether it was possible to pinpoint someone actually doing this and show with chapter and verse how such distortion occurred.
Others, however, saw the trial as being about far more than the issue of falsification, serious though that was. What was at stake, thought The Times of London, was “whether one of the blackest chapters of 20th-century history actually happened, or is a figment of imaginative and politically motivated Jewry.”78 It was this belief that led a large number of commentators to describe the trial as “one of the most far-reaching court cases ever heard on the Holocaust.”79 Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, spoke for many when he said before the trial: “it’s almost inevitable that the major focus of the case will be the crimes of the Holocaust and whether they took place and how they’re interpreted. . . . Any victory for Irving is a loss for historical justice and a blow to the memory of the Holocaust.”80
For many German observers, this all made the trial difficult to understand. Ralf Sottscheck, writing in the Berlin Tageszeitung, thought that the English libel law did indeed make it necessary “to prove that the Holocaust took place.”81 And this was precisely the problem. In Germany itself, the historical reality of the Holocaust was anchored in law as legally indisputable, like the fact that the earth was round, and Irving had long been known by commentators as “the most prominent whitewasher of the Nazis in the world,” as Jost Nolte put it at the beginning of the trial. Like many Central European commentators, Nolte confessed himself baffled by the fact that the matter had come to trial at all. “How does one react,” he asked, “if someone claims the sheep ate the wolf, or a Jewish beggar attacked a German shepherd dog? With counter-proofs? With arguments? Hardly. One is more likely to call in a psychiatrist.”82 For this reason, many German and Austrian observers simply found the whole case “bizarre,” “nonsensical.” and “absurd.”83 “It is,” wrote Caroline Fetscher, “as if a quack was challenging the most prominent doctors in the international medical profession. Absurd. Here in London an obsessive charlatan is forcing a parade of top researchers to take part in a duel that he will win one way or another, either as a martyr or as a successful plaintiff.”84 “Really,” wrote Werner Birkenmaier in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, “this trial is a farce. All the world knows that six million Jews were murdered, and yet we still have to debate this fact in front of a court.”85
Walter Reich, former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, even feared that alarmists who proclaimed that the case constituted “nothing less than a trial of the truth of the Holocaust,” might give the verdict more weight than it deserved. “If the plaintiff wins, the alarmists will have created the very sort of damage that they are trying to prevent–doubt among the ill-informed about whether the Holocaust happened.” He took issue with Deborah Lipstadt’s claim that if she had not contested the lawsuit, Irving’s “definition of the Holocaust would have become the standard definition recognized by the High Court in London.” This indeed might have been something of an exaggeration on Lipstadt’s part. On the other hand, there was something to it as well. For if Irving did win, the way would be open for him and those who agreed with him to sue anyone who claimed that their version of events rested on the falsification and manipulation of evidence, or suggested that they were not engaged in legitimate and bona fide historical research. To this extent, a judgment in Irving’s favor would indeed legitimate his denial of the Holocaust, if that turned out to be what he was engaged in.
While a finding for Irving, Reich thought, “might say something about the nature of British libel law, it would say nothing at all about the reality of the Holocaust.” Strictly speaking, of course, this was true; but Reich did not consider the consequences for free debate and discussion about the Holocaust, and in particular about how it was researched and written about, in the event of an Irving victory. These could be very serious indeed.86 Quite apart from anything else, a victory for the plaintiff would have meant a confirmation of all the abuse that Irving had heaped upon the historical profession over the years.87 So much more was involved than simply deciding on the issue of falsification, important though this was.
Was the Holocaust on trial, then? David Cesarani argued that the idea that “history was on trial” was a “common misconception” about the case. The factuality of the Holocaust was never at issue. “The outcome of the trial,” wrote Cesarani, “will not alter events from 1933 to 1945.”88 Indeed, Judge Charles Gray, who presided over the trial itself, made the central issue very clear from the outset. “What was at issue–it can’t be said too often–was Irving’s methodology and historiography, not what happened back in the 40s,” he said. The distinction between whether the evidence was that the Holocaust had happened, and whether the Holocaust had actually happened in reality, was a real one.89 This view was echoed by others involved in the case, including Anthony Julius himself.90 Irving also repeatedly drew everyone’s attention to the fact that what was at issue in the action was what went on within the four walls of his own study, not what went on in East-Central Europe during the Second World War.91
Yet in the end the distinction proved almost impossible to maintain.92 In reality the trial was about both issues.93 If the evidence for the gas chambers, the 6 million dead, and other aspects of the Holocaust was overwhelming, indisputable, then surely this did amount to proving, insofar as historians could prove anything, that it had actually happened. In a more general way, too, the trial had a direct bearing on how the Holocaust would be regarded and how it was debated and discussed in public. The most perceptive reporters were fully aware of what was at stake in this connection. Neal Ascherson, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung at the end of the third week of the trial, pointed out: “Should Irving win this case, then the damages would be the least evil. Much worse would be the fact that his credibility as a historian would be salvaged by such a judgment; his version of the Holocaust and his interpretation of Hitler would suddenly count as plausible.”94 “If he wins,” Ian Burrell of The Independent noted, irrespective of the particular instance of Irving himself, “the door will have been opened for revisionists to rewrite any event in history without a requirement to consider evidence that does not suit them and without fear that they will be publicly denounced for their distortion.”95
All these implications emerged only gradually, as preparations for the trial went ahead and then the public proceedings themselves got under way. In a sense, they did not concern those of us who were involved in researching and writing the expert reports. What we had to concentrate on were the specific allegations that were at the heart of the legal action. In the case of Lipstadt’s charge against Irving of falsifying the evidence, this demanded some form of selectivity. The sheer mass of material was simply too great to go through in the time available before the report had to be submitted to the High Court in July 1999. It seemed clear that Irving’s work had to be scrutinized with a view to reaching an opinion on whether or not he was a Holocaust denier, a claim by Lipstadt that Irving vehemently rejected. And as far as the issue of falsification was concerned, it seemed sensible to link this to another of Lipstadt’s allegations–that Irving was an admirer of Adolf Hitler–and go through all the instances where Irving claimed to have documentary evidence that Hitler was a friend of the Jews and did his best to stop them being persecuted and killed–if, indeed, that was what he argued.
Finally, as a kind of control exercise, just to see if this particular argument was some kind of aberration from a normally scrupulous handling of the evidence on Irving’s part, we decided to look at his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945, in a book that had established his reputation and probably been more successful than any other he had written. All this still left open the larger issues of principle raised by the allegation of falsification. How this would emerge from the detailed scrutiny of Irving’s sources remained to be seen. After eighteen months’ hard work, I finally completed my report at the end of July 1999. It is time to turn to what I discovered about Irving’s way of dealing with the evidence and his manner of writing about the past.