At issue in the case brought by Irving against Lipstadt was not only her contention that he falsified history, but also her allegation that he was a Holocaust denier (Denying the Holocaust, p. 111). What exactly did this mean? The term Holocaust, derived from an ancient Greek version of the Old Testament, originally meant a burnt sacrificed offering dedicated exclusively to God. Many scholars had reservations about its application to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, who were not being sacrificed or offered to God, but were brutally murdered in the name of ethnic purity. Used in German, some argued, the word had a distancing and almost euphemistic effect. However, despite these reservations, the word had gained currency until it was difficult to avoid using it altogether.1
The meaning of the term Holocaust might have been metaphorical rather than literal; common usage made what it referred to abundantly clear. The standard work by the distinguished Canadian historian Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History focused on, to use his own words, “the Holocaust, the systematic mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazis.”2 Similarly, Sir Martin Gilbert, in his documentary compilation The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, concurred in referring to “the systematic attempt to destroy all European Jewry–an attempt now known as the Holocaust.” Another author, Ronnie S. Landau, put forward a similar definition: ‘The Holocaust involved the deliberate, systematic murder of approximately 6 million Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe between 1941 and 1945.’ Numerous other writers employed the term in roughly the same sense.3
The use of the term Holocaust was ultimately a secondary issue. However it was labeled, there was wide agreement among historians that there was a systematic attempt undertaken by the Nazi regime in Germany between 1941 and 1945 to kill all the Jews of Europe, and that it succeeded to the extent of murdering between 5 and 6 million of them in a variety of ways, including mass gassings in camps specially constructed for the purpose. These events were known about from a variety of sources. There was testimony from Jewish survivors of the camps (principally, Auschwitz) and the ghettos. The Nazi authorities also left contemporary documentation providing details of the policy of extermination and its implementation. After the war, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg presented a mass of testimony and documentation in a series of trials both of leading Nazis and of lesser but still important figures. Other trials followed over the years, yielding more evidence. The physical remains of at least some of the camps, notably Auschwitz, were also available for inspection. Hundreds of scholars from many different countries had published detailed research based on all this material.4
Standing apart from this scholarly literature was an attempt by a small number of writers to deny that there was any systematic or organized extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis; to suggest that the number of Jews killed was far smaller than 5 or 6 million; and to claim that there were no gas chambers or other specially built extermination facilities. Who were these people? I knew something about them from my reading of Lipstadt’s book, but reading them in the original was an altogether different experience from encountering them through the filter of Lipstadt’s cool, academic prose. They inhabited an intellectual world that was far removed from the cautious rationality of academic historical scholarship. What moved them seemed to be a strange mixture of prejudice and bitter personal experience.
After the war, perhaps the earliest proponent of these views was the Frenchman Paul Rassinier (1908–67). Rassinier had apparently been beaten by a communist fellow-prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp for failing to recognize or pay his respects to the imprisoned German communist leader Ernst Thälmann (subsequently murdered by the SS in 1944). His fellow-prisoners seemed more dangerous than the SS guards to him. Rassinier eventually got a relatively easy job in the infirmary on his transfer to camp Dora in the Harz mountains, where he was evidently well treated by his boss, a senior SS officer. These experiences seem to have prejudiced him in favor of the Nazis. He initially published a defense of the SS against its critics and denied reports by survivors of atrocities in the camps, then went on to dispute the existence of the gas chambers and to assert that it was the Jews who had started the Second World War.5
Another relatively early denier was Austin J. App, author of The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses. App estimated the total number of Jewish casualties of the Third Reich at around three hundred thousand, and declared the ‘six million’ to be “an impudent lie.” Born in 1902, App was for a time president of the Federation of American Citizens of German Descent, and in 1942 he campaigned in the United States in support of Nazi war aims. In the early years after the war, he defended the Nazi mass murder of the Jews and similar atrocities as legitimate acts of war, minimized the numbers of victims, and denied the existence of gas chambers. In his book, he argued that the “fraudulent six million casualty” figure for Jewish deaths at the hands of the Nazis was used “vindictively as an external club for pressuring indemnities out of West Germany and for wringing financial contributions out of American Jews.” He alleged that at least five hundred thousand of the Jews supposedly gassed in the camps had gone to Israel. The perpetuation of the ‘swindle’ was due to Jewish domination of the media. The Americans and the British and above all the Soviet Union colluded in the deception in order to distract attention from their own war crimes.6
Perhaps the most influential proponent of such views was Arthur R. Butz, an engineering professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University, whose book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, published in 1976, constituted the first attempt to present Holocaust denial in a pseudo-academic form. Its eight chapters were adorned with 450 footnotes, 5 appendices, and 32 plates and diagrams and it looked at first glance like an academic treatise. The book argued, inter alia, that the Allied bombing of Dresden produced more corpses than had ever been found from the camps, that Zyklon-B gas was used strictly as an insecticide, that Auschwitz was an industrial plant, that deaths there were mainly caused by typhus, and that no gassings took place there. In Butz’s view, when the Nazis talked or wrote about Judentum (‘Jewry’), they meant the destruction of Jewish power, not of Jewish human beings, and when they used the word annihilation (Vernichtung) or extirpation (Ausrottung) in this context, they did not mean actual killing. He alleged that the failure of the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, in Jerusalem, to collect 6 million names of those who had died, proved that the number of dead was far fewer than 6 million. The Nuremberg trials were a frame-up in Butz’s view, and the myth of the Holocaust was propagated after the war by the Jews for their own advantage.7
Perhaps the most active and vocal of the deniers in the 1980s and 1990s was the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, a former university teacher of French literature who had argued over many years that “the alleged massacres in the ‘gas chambers’ and the alleged ‘genocide’ were part of the same lie,” which “is essentially Zionist in origin” and “has allowed a huge political and financial swindle of which the state of Israel is the principal beneficiary.” Faurisson concentrated in particular on attempting to prove that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and in other camps never existed. He was tried in his native France for slander, violation of Article 382 of the Civil Code by wilfully distorting history, and incitement to racial hatred, which had been outlawed under a law of 1972, and was found guilty on all three counts.8
As well as these three figures, a role was also played in the denial phenomenon by Wilhelm Staeglich, an academically qualified German lawyer whose book Der Auschwitz-Mythos: Legende oder Wirklichkeit (The Auschwitz Myth: Legend or Reality), published in 1979 by the far-right Grabert-Verlag in Germany, followed Butz in presenting Holocaust denial in a pseudo-academic form. The book argued that there had been no mass extermination of Jews in Nazi extermination camps, and that guilty verdicts in postwar trials of the perpetrators were wrong. Staeglich used minor discrepancies in postwar documents and reports of the extermination to dismiss all such documents as forgeries and falsifications. As a result of this book Staeglich was dismissed from state employment and his doctoral title was withdrawn by his university.9
Figures such as these operated on the fringes of public life. Their books were mostly distributed by mail order and could seldom be found on the shelves of respectable bookshops or libraries. They seemed to belong in the world of sensational newspapers such as you could buy in American supermarkets, recounting the experiences of people who had been abducted by little green aliens or who had seen Elvis Presley still alive. There was indeed a distinct genre of historical writing about Nazi Germany that could be slotted into this category and seemed to find enough readers for publishers to be willing to sell it. The past few years, for example, had seen books published claiming that the bodies in the Berlin bunker in 1945 were not really those of Hitler and Eva Braun, and that the Heinrich Himmler, who committed suicide when he was arrested a few weeks later by the British, was not really Heinrich Himmler; that Hitler’s aide Martin Bormann was spirited away from Berlin at the end of the war by the British agent Ian Fleming, later author of the James Bond spy novels, and given a new identity as a doctor in the English home counties in exchange for information about Nazi gold; that Hitler became an antisemite because he studied at the same school as the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Jewish boy who became the twentieth century’s most influential philosopher, and hated him because of his superior intelligence; that Klaus von Stauffenberg, who tried to blow up Hitler in July 1944, was not acting as part of a recently founded German resistance movement but in the service of a centuries-old secret society whose tradition reached back to the time of Christ; and so on.
All of this work tried to present its arguments as the outcome of serious historical scholarship, resting on a combination of detailed documentary research and careful scholarly reasoning. Often it was extremely ingenious and required a considerable effort to unpick and to refute. Its authors, however fantastic the theories they were putting forward, in most cases really seemed to believe what they were saying. I had reviewed a few of these books over the years and often wondered why their authors had written them. They did not seem to have any particular political axe to grind. What they were offering was more a perverse kind of entertainment to the reader. They belonged to a paranoid style of historical writing: nothing was quite what it seemed, and terrible secrets had been suppressed by mainstream historical scholarship for decades or even centuries. Unlike genuine historians, however, these writers were never willing to accept criticism, and stuck to their theses, however convincing the documentary evidence that was thrown at them.
For the most part, engaging with work such as this seemed pointless. It might be irritating, but on the whole it seemed fairly harmless. The writings of people like Rassinier, Butz, Faurisson, and Staeglich were different, however. For a start, it was surely deeply offensive to the many thousands of Hitler’s victims who had been through the camps and the persecution and were now confronted by people telling them that virtually nothing of what they had suffered had ever happened. Those who had lost relatives and loved ones in the Nazi extermination program were now being told that they had not lost them at all, or if they had, it was through disease or secret emigration to Palestine. Moreover, while events such as the death in 1945 of Hitler, Eva Braun, Himmler, and Bormann, or Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life, were discrete happenings that were not difficult to verify, the denial of such a large and complex chunk of history as the systematic extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis was on a vastly larger scale, and called in question a huge mass of historical evidence carefully gathered and interpreted by professional historians over the decades.
Moreover, much of the writings of the Holocaust deniers seemed neither morally nor politically harmless. On the contrary, a good deal of them seemed to be linked to racial hatred and antisemitic animosity in the most direct possible way. And, unlike the purveyors of historical fantasies about the survival of Bormann or the relationship between Hitler and Wittgenstein, the Holocaust deniers were not maverick individualists but fed off each other’s work and organized journals, conferences, and institutes to exchange views and disseminate publications.
It was for these reasons that they had attracted a good deal of attention from serious scholars in recent years. Deborah Lipstadt’s book, published in the United States in 1993, was the most thorough study of the deniers, but it was by no means the first. Others who sought to describe and explain the phenomenon included the British political scientist Roger Eatwell,10 the distinguished French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, writing in 1980,11 the Israeli scholar Yisrael Gutman, author of Denying the Holocaust,12 the German political scientist Armin Pfahl-Traughber,13 and Limor Yagil, a researcher working for the Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University.14 An important early book on this phenomenon was Gill Seidel’s The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism and the New Right, published in 1986.15
Clearly there were some differences among these various authors’ depiction of Holocaust denial, and equally clearly, not all Holocaust deniers subscribed to all the views which they mentioned, or held them to the same degree. However, reducing them all to a lowest common denominator, it seemed clear that Holocaust denial involved the minimum following beliefs:
Lipstadt had alleged in her book that Irving belonged to the weird and irrational world of Holocaust denial. Whether or not he could reasonably be called a ‘Holocaust denier’ could be determined by examining his public statements to see if these four basic principles of Holocaust denial were present. Did what he had said and written about the Nazi extermination of the Jews conform to what Rassinier, Butz, Faurisson, Staeglich, and others had said and written? And did he have any contacts with such individuals or with organizations devoted to Holocaust denial? I determined to find out.
In his written submission to the court, Irving wrote: “It is a particularly mischievous and damaging libel to call the Plaintiff ‘a Holocaust denier,’ a lie worthy of the Nazi propaganda minister Dr Goebbels himself.”17 Irving asserted “that the whole of World War Two can be defined as a Holocaust.” He considered it “invidious to single out one single act of mass murder of innocents and to label it ‘The Holocaust,’ as though there was none other.” He went on:
If however the Defendants seek to define the Holocaust as the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their cohorts during World War II, then the Plaintiff maintains that he has at no time denied it; on the contrary, he has rendered it more plausible by investigating documents, questioning witnesses, and uncovering fresh sources and making no secret of for example the alleged liquidation of 152,000 Jews at Chelmno on December 8, 1941, about which he wrote in Hitler’s War, 1991 edition, at page 426. At page 7 of his book on aerial warfare against civilians Von Guernica bis Vietnam (From Guernica to Vietnam), the very first page of text, the Plaintiff emphasised: “The massacre of minorities by the National Socialists in Germany . . . probably cost more lives than all the air raids carried out to the present date.”18
Similarly, Irving maintained that he had “at no time denied that the Nazis established concentration camps throughout their territories.” He had “at no time denied that the murder of the Jews began in about June 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, or that hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot to death.” In this context he referred to pages 270–71 of the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War, pages 380–81 of the revised 1991 edition of the same book, and unnumbered pages of his 1996 biography of Goebbels.19
When I looked at them more closely, however, it became clear that these points did not really relate to the Holocaust as defined by most historians. Irving wrote only of an alleged liquidation at Chelmno; he did not accept, therefore, that 152,000 Jews were actually killed there. He referred to concentration camps, but the existence of such camps was not at issue, for nobody denied that concentration camps were built to imprison those whom the Nazis regarded as their enemies, above all within the borders of the Reich, at Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Flossenbürg, and elsewhere. What was at issue was a different category of camp, namely those constructed in occupied Eastern Europe, such as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Chelmno, and built specifically and exclusively to exterminate Jews, or, in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, with extermination as one of its principal aims: in other words, the extermination camps. Finally, the murder by shooting of hundreds of thousands of Jews was not the same as the extermination by shooting, gassing, starvation, and deliberate neglect of millions of Jews which formed an essential part of the Holocaust as conventionally understood.
Moreover, the book on aerial warfare to which Irving referred was published in 1982. On reading through his many books and speeches, I soon realized that Irving’s views on these issues had not stood still over time. In his introduction to the first edition of Hitler’s War, Irving referred to “the methodical liquidation of Russian Jews during the ‘Barbarossa’ invasion of 1941,” and also to the fact that the Nazis “kept the extermination machinery going until the end of the war.”20 Leaving aside for the moment Irving’s view of Hitler’s role in all this, it was clear that in 1977 Irving accepted that the Nazis had systematically killed the Jews of Europe in very large numbers. In the index to the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War, for example, there were seventeen entries under the heading “Jews, extermination of, documenting responsibility for and knowledge of,” referring to thirty-one pages of text. Another entry in the index was for “Auschwitz, extermination camp at.” These pages made no attempt to deny the fact of the extermination. When the Jews were deported to the East on Hitler’s orders, Irving wrote on page 391, their fate was determined by lower-level officials. “Arriving at Auschwitz and Treblinka, four in every ten were pronounced fit for work; the rest were exterminated with a maximum of concealment.” Similarly, on page 332 of the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War, Irving referred to “the extermination program,” which, he wrote, “had gained a momentum of its own.”
All this had made it plain to most commentators that Irving was not a hard-core Holocaust denier in the 1970s or early 1980s.21 By the end of the 1980s, however, all this had changed, and Irving had clearly moved from ‘soft-core’ to ‘hard-core’ Holocaust denial.22 When I looked at the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, it became clear that the picture painted by Irving here was very different from what it had looked like in the first edition. The references made in 1977 to “the extermination of the Jews,” “the methodical liquidation of Russian Jews,” and “the extermination machinery” had all been deleted from the introduction by 1991. Indeed, the word extermination no longer appeared at all. Instead, Irving referred vaguely to “the Jewish tragedy,” “the Nazi maltreatment of the Jews,” or “the entire tragedy.” The index entry was still there in 1991, as in 1977, for “Auschwitz, extermination camp at,” as it was for “Treblinka, extermination camp at.” But on the pages in question (463–47 in 1991, 390–93 in 1977) the account had undergone some significant alterations. In 1991, the 1977 references to the “murder machinery” and “the extermination center at Treblinka,” had gone. In their place was new material describing Himmler’s visit to Auschwitz on 18 July 1942 and citing the postwar interrogation of Albert Hoffmann, an SS man who accompanied Himmler on the visit, noting that “maltreatment did occur” but adding that he “totally disbelieves the accounts of atrocities as published in the press” after the war. Irving explicitly denied that there was any documentary sanction for the story that Himmler witnessed the ‘liquidation’ of a trainload of Jews on this occasion, and added: “By late 1945 the world’s newspapers were full of unsubstantiated, lurid rumors about ‘factories of death’ complete with lethal ‘gas chambers.’ ”
Perhaps most noteworthy of all was the difference between the two versions of Irving’s account of Hitler’s address to a group of generals about Hungary’s Jews on 26 May 1944:
1977: In Auschwitz, the defunct paraphenalia of death–idle since 1943–began to clank again as the first trainloads from Hungary arrived.
1991: Four hundred thousand Jews were being rounded up in Hungary; the first trainloads arrived in Asuchwitz as slave labor for the now completed I. G. Farben plant.
In 1977, Irving made it clear that the Hungarian Jews were killed. In 1991, he made no mention of this fact but claimed instead that they were being used merely as workers in a chemical factory.
Thus Irving’s views had altered substantially between the two editions. The turning-point seemed to have been the 1988 trial of Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian antisemite, Holocaust denier, and self-confessed admirer of Hitler. Zündel’s books included The Hitler We Loved and Why, published by a firm called White Power Publications, and UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?, which argued that unidentified flying objects, which used to be known as flying saucers, were still being deployed by survivors of the Nazi regime from bases underneath the Antarctic.23 There could be no doubt as to which worlds of thought Ernst Zündel belonged to, then: unusually, perhaps, he combined in one person two of the most bizarre fantasies in modern America. Zündel’s defense lawyers called a number of Holocaust deniers as expert witnesses in an attempt to demonstrate that the information Zündel had been spreading about the Holocaust was not false. Irving also appeared as an expert witness in this trial. Irving repeatedly admitted under questioning in the court that he had changed his mind since 1977 on the issues of the numbers of Jews killed and the use of the gas chambers. “My mind has now changed,” he said, “because I understand that the whole of the Holocaust mythology is, after all, open to doubt.”24
In examining the question of whether or not Irving was a Holocaust denier, I had therefore to concentrate on his publications and statements at and after the Zündel trial in 1988, not before. For Irving himself said quite openly in 1991 that he had removed all references to extermination camps and death factories from the second edition of the book.25 I could thus disregard work published by Irving before 1988 since it was plainly irrelevant to the issue of whether Lipstadt was correct in 1994 to call him a Holocaust denier.
The first basic element of Holocaust denial was a minimization of the numbers of Jews killed. I looked through Irving’s various books, articles, and speeches to see what his estimation of the numbers was. They revealed that until the late 1980s, Irving had paid little attention to this question. In 1986, for example, while confessing that he thought “the six million figure is probably marginally exaggerated,” Irving described the minimal figure of one hundred thousand as being put forward by a “school of thought” that was “right out at the fringe,” and added that “I have to admit that I haven’t examined the Holocaust in any detail.”26
In his evidence to the Zündel trial in Canada in 1988, however, which he had put in full on his own website for all to consult, Irving was asked to comment on the following statement (put to him by the defense lawyer): “If the ‘Holocaust’ is represented as the allegation of the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Second World War as a direct result of official German policy of extermination (sic), what would you say to that thesis?” Irving replied:
I am not familiar with any documentary evidence of any such figure as 6 million . . . it must have been of the order of 100,000 or more, but to my mind it was certainly less than the figure which is quoted nowadays of 6 million. Because on the evidence of comparison with other similar tragedies which happened in the Second World War, it is unlikely that the Jewish community would have suffered any worse than these communities.27
As he himself said in 1996, “cutting the Holocaust down to its true size makes it comparable with the other crimes of World War II.”28
This applied not just to gassing and extermination camps, but also to the mass shootings carried out by the Security Service and Security Police task forces, the Einsatzgruppen. In his evidence to the Zündel trial in 1988, Irving cast doubt, for example, on the reports filed by task force leaders giving numbers of Jews shot by their forces. “I don’t trust the statistics they contain,” he said. “Soldiers who are out in the field doing a job or murderers who are out in the field doing a job, they don’t have time to count.” Each leader, he suggested, submitted reports whose aim was to “show he’s doing a jolly good job,” and by inference, therefore, seriously exaggerated or even invented the numbers killed. “Statistics like this are meaningless,” Irving said. “I’m suggesting,” he continued, “it is possible that at the time some overzealous SS officer decided to put in a fictitious figure in order to do Heinrich Himmler a favour.” This of course was pure speculation, unsupported by any documentary evidence. This was characteristic of Irving’s methods in disposing of inconvenient documents. If a document did appear that Irving was unable to suggest was not genuine, or in some way unreliable, such as a memorandum from Himmler to Hitler in which three hundred thousand Jews were referred to in 1942 as having been exterminated, Irving said he was “unhappy about it because it is such an unusual, isolated document.”29 But of course, it was only “isolated” because Irving had dismissed or ignored other documentary evidence that pointed in the same direction: there was no genuine documentary warrant at all for this remark.
By the middle of the 1990s, Irving was deploying a range of arguments to buttress his minimal estimates for the numbers of Jews killed by the Nazis. In Nuremberg: The Last Battle, he claimed that the Auschwitz death books gave 46,000 names of people who had perished in the camp, mainly from disease.30 Citing British decrypts of German code messages from Auschwitz to Berlin, Irving suggested on a number of occasions that some 25,000 Jews possibly died in Auschwitz by killing, the rest from disease, the cause given in most of the reports.31 On occasion, he went so far as to suggest that all the Jews who died in Auschwitz died from disease: “Probably 100,000 Jews died in Auschwitz,” he said in 1993, “but not from gas chambers, they died from epidemics.”32
Irving actually claimed that the official history of British Intelligence during the Second World War, by the late Professor Sir Harry Hinsley,
states . . . that upon analysis of the daily returns of the Auschwitz concentration camp, it becomes completely plain that nearly all of the deaths, nearly all of the deaths, were due to disease. The others were by execution, by hanging, and by firing squad. There is no reference, and I’m quoting this page, there is no reference whatever to any gassings. So why hasn’t this extraordinary revelation been headlined in the newspapers around the world? It’s not just some cranky, self-appointed, British, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi pseudo-historian. And you journalists who are present can take those words down. It’s not just some pseudo-historian from Britain saying this. This is the British official historian, Professor Hinsley, who had unlimited access to the archives of the SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, and to the archives of the British code-breaking agency, who says that in Auschwitz nearly all the deaths were due to disease. There is no reference whatsoever to gassings. (Applause).33
In fact, when I looked up the passage, Hinsley did not claim that nearly all the deaths were due to disease; all he wrote was that the British decrypts of encoded radio messages sent from Auschwitz did not mention gassings, which was hardly surprising, given the Nazis’ policy of not mentioning the gas chambers explicitly in any of their communications with one another.
Moreover, although Irving claimed that the radio reports from Auschwitz to the central administration of the camps in Berlin were decrypted by British intelligence at Bletchley Park “from 1942 to the end of 1943,”34 in fact the decrypts ended on 1 September 1942, when the authorities stopped reporting deaths by radio, and reported them only in writing. The returns to which Hinsley referred covered early to mid-1942, which was the only period during which the total number of prisoners in the camp corresponded to the total number of inmates mentioned in the decrypts. It was only subsequently that numbers increased (to 135,000 in March 1943) and mass gassing began on a really large scale with the completion of Crematorium II in March 1943.35 Crucially, too, the decrypts were decipherments of radio reports of the additions and subtractions to the regular, registered camp population: these reports omitted all unregistered Jews (as well as gypsies) selected for gassing immediately on arrival. Thus they proved nothing, except that there were numerous deaths from executions and disease among the long-term camp inmates.36 Finally, as Hinsley himself pointed out in reply to a letter from Irving on 17 June 1991, he had not in any case seen the original intercepts himself: “I saw only a summary of them, compiled afterwards, and they were probably not translated and circulated at the time.”37 The originals certainly contained information not purveyed in the summaries, and it was anybody’s guess as to what it might have been. The decrypts therefore completely failed to substantiate Irving’s allegation that there were no deaths by gassing in Auschwitz.
This was far from being the only attempt Irving made to twist the evidence in order to minimize the numbers of Jews deliberately murdered by the Nazis. “Despite the most strenuous efforts,” he also claimed, “the Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem, has compiled a list of no more than three million possible Holocaust victims. The same names appear in this list many times over.”38 This did not mean, of course, that the same names referred to the same people; nor did the fact that the number of names compiled totaled less than 6 million mean that 6 million were not killed. The figure of 6 million, Irving said, originated in a guesstimate based on a comparison of European Jewish population figures in 1929 and 1946. It had no basis, he declared, in documented historical fact.39 Yet the discrepancy in population was a documented historical fact.
When it came to suggesting ways in which the missing Jews might in fact have survived the war, Irving suddenly and conveniently forgot his demand for documented historical fact. Nobody, he alleged, had “explained what became of the one million cadavers” which it was claimed “were produced by killing operations at Auschwitz,” nor for that matter what happened to the alleged corpses produced by supposed gassings in other camps.40 There was no trace in Allied aerial photographs of mass graves at Auschwitz, so where had the bodies gone? he asked.41 Irving himself supplied more than one answer. He claimed that the Jews who disappeared did not die but were secretly transported to Palestine by the Haganah, the Zionist underground, and given new identities. He suggested some of the missing Jews were killed in the February 1945 bombing raid on Dresden: “Many other raids were like that. Nobody knows how many Jews died in them. Nobody knows how many Jews died on the road of hunger or cold, after the evacuation of concentration camps in late 1944 and early 1945. Nobody knows how many Jews survived in displaced persons’ camps. None of the Holocaust historians have researched this.”42
Such wild and unfounded speculations commonly occurred in Irving’s speeches. They derived in part from the Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier’s unsubstantiated assertion that four-fifths of the 5 to 6 million Jews most historians agreed had been killed in fact “were very much alive at the end of the war,” repeated by Arthur Butz in his Holocaust denial tract The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.43 Irving did concede in his 1992 speech that there were some unauthorized mass shootings of Jews behind the Eastern Front. On this point, he was explicitly supported by Robert Faurisson, who, speaking on this occasion from among his listeners, confirmed: “We assume that there were massacres and hostages and reprisals and so on. . . . There is no war without massacres, especially on the Russian front where you had Jews, and partisans, women, and children all mixed together.” Irving agreed: “It’s important to say this because we are called Holocaust deniers, and the television screens show you the mass graves and all the rest of it, which we don’t deny.”44 Irving repeated this point once more, in 1995, conceding that “there is no doubt in my mind that on the Eastern front large numbers of Jews were massacred, by criminals with guns–SS men, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, whatever–to get rid of them.”45 Atrocities always occurred during wars.46
Did this amount to ‘Holocaust denial’? I thought it did. Irving admitted in 1992 without qualification that “Eichmann’s memoirs are an important element of the refutation of the Holocaust story.”47 If engaging in a refutation of the Holocaust story was not Holocaust denial, then what was? “For me as a historian,” Irving said in 1992, “the Holocaust is a mere footnote to history. I write about world history; I write about Real History, and I am not going to talk at any great length about something which is of far more obsessive interest to other historians, revisionists, or whatever.”48 Speaking in Toronto on 1 November 1992, Irving declared:
The legend was that Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of six million Jews in gas chambers in Auschwitz. This is roughly how history has had its way for the last forty or fifty years. . . . Well, I am not a Holocaust denier, and that word really offends me, but I am a Holocaust analyst, I think we are entitled to analyse the basic elements of the statement: Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of six million Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz, and to ask, is any part of this statement open to doubt?49
Once again Irving, as in another speech made during his Canadian lecture tour in 1992, was using the term analysis as a euphemism for denial; the difference between analysis and denial here was nonexistent: “I don’t like this word ‘deny,’ ” he said in 1993 with reference to the figure of 6 million Jewish victims of Nazism: “the word ‘deny’ is only one step away from lying, really. I challenge it, I contest it.”50 There was nothing about the word denial that implied telling a lie, however, any more than there was anything about the words challenge, contestation, or analysis that implied telling the truth.
At the beginning of his videotape The Search for Truth in History, Irving said once more: “The Holocaust with a capital ‘H’ is what’s gone down in history in this one sentence form, so to speak: ‘Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of six million Jews in Auschwitz.’ ”51 But nobody had ever argued that 6 million Jews were killed by gassing in Auschwitz. Irving’s claim that this was what the term Holocaust meant was a figment of his own imagination. The standard works on the Holocaust made it clear both that a substantial proportion of those killed were shot or starved to death or deliberately weakened and made susceptible to fatal disease as a matter of policy, that gassings took place at other centers besides Auschwitz, including notably Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and that the number killed in Auschwitz was around 1.1 million.52
Only on one recorded occasion, during an interview with the Australian journalist Ron Casey on 27 July 1995 (after the publication of Deborah Lipstadt’s book) did Irving depart at all significantly from his minimization of the numbers killed:
CASEY:What is your estimate of the number of Jews who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime in the war years? What number–and I don’t like using this word–what number would you concede were killed in concentration camps?
IRVING:I think, like any scientist, I’d have to give you a range of figures and I’d have to say a minimum of one million, which is a monstrous crime, and a maximum of about four million, depending on what you mean by killed. If putting people into a concentration camp where they die of barbarity and typhus and epidemics is killing, then I would say the four million figure, because, undoubtedly, huge numbers did die in the camps in the conditions that were very evident at the end of the war.53
Even in giving, exceptionally, a figure of between one and 4 million however, it was noticeable that Irving strongly qualified his remarks by claiming that “barbarity and typhus and epidemics” were the main causes of death. Irving had a long record of blaming the high mortality rate in the camps–insofar as he conceded it at all–on epidemics rather than on deliberate, systematic killing. Thus, for example, in 1986 he told an audience, again in Australia, that the piles of dead filmed in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war had been the result of epidemics that “had only broken out in the last two or three weeks of the war.” And who, in Irving’s view, was responsible for these epidemics?
We have to admit probably that we, the British and the Americans, were partially responsible, at least partially responsible for their misfortune. Because we vowed deliberate bombing of the transportation networks, deliberate bombardation, bombarding the German communications, by deliberate destruction of the German pharmaceutical industry, medicine factories. We had deliberately created the conditions of chaos inside Germany. We had deliberately created the epidemics, and the outbreaks of typhus and other diseases, which led to those appalling scenes that were found at their most dramatic in the enclosed areas, the concentration camps, where of course epidemics can ravage and run wild.54
In fact, of course, conditions for epidemics were deliberately created by the Nazis, who ran the camps in a way that deprived the inmates of hygiene and medical attention as a matter of policy.55 Yet Irving had a repeated tendency to blame virtually all the deaths of the Second World War on the Allies in general, the British in particular, and above all on Winston Churchill. Thus he told an audience in South Africa in 1986:
We went in and we bombed the Belgians, and the Poles, and the French, and the Dutch. We did appalling damage. We killed millions of people in Europe in the most bestial way, in defiance of all conventions. In a way which eventually damned with infamy on the name of the British, and it all goes back on Winston Churchill’s name.
Indeed, he said on another occasion, probably in the same year: “We’d killed 20 million people.”56 Winston Churchill, in Irving’s view, “bears at least a partial share of the blame for the tragedy that befell the Jews in Europe, because Churchill fought the war five years longer than was necessary and provided the smokescreen behind which the tragedy could occur.”57
Closely linked to these views was the denial of the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Irving declared in his written submission to the court: “It is denied that the Plaintiff has denied the Holocaust; it is denied that the Plaintiff has denied that gas chambers were used by the Nazis as the principal means of carrying out that extermination; they may have used them on occasion on an experimental scale, which fact he does not deny.”58 This sentence was remarkably self-contradictory. Was he saying that he accepted that the gas chambers were the principal means of killing, or that their use was only possible (“may have used”) and if it did occur, was he merely saying that it was only experimental in scale?
It was also contradicted by another line of defense he took against the accusation of being a Holocaust denier, namely, to deny that there was any authentic wartime archival evidence for the existence of gassing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka–a cautious statement stopping short of an outright denial but clearly designed to imply that those gassing facilities therefore did not exist.59 If Irving was implying here that he would not accept any evidence about the Second World War unless it was written at the time, then how did he justify his own extensive use of the postwar testimony of members of Hitler’s entourage given in interviews with them conducted by himself? Here again, he was applying double standards in his approach to different types of evidence. The fact was that historians had to take all kinds of evidence into account, and apply the same standards of criticism to all of them. Irving was wrong to imply that there was no authentic wartime evidence of gassing facilities in the camps he mentioned. But even if he had been right, this would not have meant that there was no authentic evidence of any kind for their existence.
Nevertheless, Irving clearly meant to imply that there was not. In his testimony to the Zündel trial in 1988, he explicitly rejected the use of the term extermination camps apart from Chelmno, which “was operating on a very small scale,” and by shooting, not gassing.60 In 1992, he put forward the same kind of argument in describing the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann. Irving said:
He also describes–and I have to say this being an honest historian–going to another location a few weeks later and being driven around in a bus; then being told by the bus driver to look through a peephole into the back of the bus where he saw a number of prisoners being gassed by the exhaust fumes. So I accept that this kind of experiment was made on a very limited scale, but that it was rapidly abandoned as being a totally inefficient way of killing people. But, I don’t accept that the gas chambers existed, and this is well known. I’ve seen no evidence at all that gas chambers existed.61
This minor concession was characteristic of his technique in admitting small-scale, limited instances of what he devoted much of his attention to denying on the large scale, as a kind of alibi that enabled him to deny that he was really doing the latter at all. He alleged that “equal tonnages of Zyklon-B pesticide granules were delivered to Auschwitz and Oranienburg camps, at which latter camp nobody had ever suggested that gas chambers existed, and to camps in Norway.” Recently discovered documents in former Soviet archives showed that Auschwitz prisoners, he said, were released to the outside world on completion of their sentence. This was “incompatible with the character of a top-secret mass extermination centre.” This again applied only to registered prisoners, and only to a minuscule number of them.62
Irving also denied “that diesel engines could be used for killing operations. These engines,” he said, “exhaust non-lethal carbon dioxide (CO2), and only minute quantities of toxic carbon monoxide (CO). These howlers,” he says, “typify the flawed historical research into ‘the Holocaust’ even now, fifty years after the tragedy.”63 In his videotaped speech The Search for Truth in History, made in 1993, Irving also asked: “How can you gas millions of people with hydrogen cyanide gas and leave not the slightest significant trace of chemical residue in the walls of the gas chambers?” This was a reference to the so-called Leuchter Report, a document commissioned by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson for use in Zündel’s defense in the 1988 trial. In this report, the American Fred Leuchter (pronounced ‘Looshter’), designer of gas chambers and lethal injection devices used in the administration of the death penalty in some states in the United States, declared that his examination of the cyanide residues in the inner walls of the gas chambers in Auschwitz proved that they had not been used for gassing at all. Irving accepted the report’s findings and published them in Britain. Indeed a reading of the report had proved decisive in bringing Irving round to full-scale Holocaust denial in 1988.64 Irving went on to claim that Dr. Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz State Museum had had the tests secretly replicated and when the State Forensic Laboratory in Cracow had confirmed Leuchter’s findings the museum suppressed the fact and filed the report away.65
It was not difficult to check up on Irving’s arguments. They turned out to be specious and derivative, and corresponded closely to a number of the same points put forward by well-known Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson.66 I was able to establish that the Polish authorities did not suppress findings of their own investigations of the former gas chambers, and these findings did not confirm Leuchter’s claims. And of course the literature made it abundantly clear that prisoners sent to Auschwitz for extermination were not enrolled on the camp’s list of inmates, but were sent straight away to the gas chamber; so naturally there was no record of their release.67 As for the unfortunate Jews who were crammed into gas vans, eyewitness reports described them as being slowly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, which is one reason why it was eventually replaced by the somewhat faster-acting Zyklon-B, to spare the distress caused, not to the victims, but to the perpetrators who waited outside for them to die and had to listen to their screams and bangings on the sides of the van.
The Leuchter Report had long since been exposed as an incompetent and thoroughly unscientific document compiled by an unqualified person; it was completely discredited, along with its author, at the second Zündel trial in 1988. Leuchter had removed samples from the inner walls of Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau and had them analyzed, with the result that the concentration of cyanide residues was found to be slight, compared with the concentrations found in the delousing facilities, thus showing, he had triumphantly declared, that the crematorium was not used for gassing people. But he had taken great chunks out of the wall instead of scrapings off the surface, thus greatly diluting whatever residues were to be found there. Even more crass, he had ignored the fact that the concentration of cyanide gas needed to kill humans was far lower than that needed to kill lice in clothing, and so failed to understand that, far from disproving the existence of the gas chamber, his findings actually tended to confirm it. Yet Irving, in his continued championing of the report, had completely ignored–or suppressed–these fatal objections to its credibility.68
In his book on the Nuremberg trials, published in 1996, Irving also noted (p. 131) that evidence was presented at Nuremberg that there were lethal gas chambers at Dachau. “The German government has certified that no lethal gas chamber was ever operated at Dachau.” But of course the Nuremberg evidence and the German government statement said two different things. Not even Irving claimed that the evidence presented at Nuremberg said that the gas chamber at Dachau ever actually came into use.69 Irving’s technique here was to present (sometimes real, sometimes invented) minor mistakes and propaganda legends at Nuremberg while ignoring the overwhelming mass of evidence on major matters of fact, using the former to discredit the latter. “There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz,” he said on 5 March 1990. In his view, only “30,000 people at the most were murdered in Auschwitz . . . that’s about as many as we Englishmen killed in a single night in Hamburg.”70 In 1995 he repeated this view: “We revisionists,” he declared, “say that gas chambers didn’t exist, and that the ‘factories of death’ didn’t exist.”71 “I’m a gas chamber denier,” he told a television interviewer in 1998. “I’m a denier that they killed hundreds of thousands of people in gas chambers, yes.”72
Irving repeatedly denied that there were any functioning gas chambers and that any Jews or other victims of Nazism were killed in them, with the sole exception of a small number who he conceded were gassed during experiments. I found plenty of instances of such comprehensive denial in his speeches. In 1989, for instance, he confessed himself “quite happy to nail my colours to the mast on that, and say that to the best of my knowledge, there is not one shower bath in any of the concentration or slave labour camps that turns out to have been some kind of gas chamber.”73 On 5 March 1990 he declared roundly to an audience in Germany once more that there were no gas chambers at all in Auschwitz during the war:
There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, there were only dummies which were built by the Poles in the postwar years, just as the Americans built the dummies in Dachau . . . these things in Auschwitz, and probably also in Majdanek, Treblinka, and in other so-called extermination camps in the East are all just dummies.
Repeating this claim later in the same speech, Irving added that “I and, increasingly, other historians, . . . are saying, the Holocaust, the gas chamber establishments in Auschwitz did not exist.”74 On 8 November 1990 he repeated the same claim to an audience in Toronto: “The gas chambers that are shown to the tourists in Auschwitz are fakes.”75 These statements were clear and unambiguous. Irving’s statement to the court of his position on this issue–“it is denied that the Plaintiff has denied that gas chambers were used by the Nazis as the principal means of carrying out that extermination”–was a falsehood.76
A third element in Holocaust denial was a refusal to accept that the extermination of the Jews was systematic, organized, or centrally directed. Where did Irving stand on this issue? Even before he changed his mind on the numbers killed and the use of gassing as a murder technique, Irving was denying that the Nazi extermination of the Jews had been carried out in a systematic manner, because he had always denied that it had been ordered by Hitler. Thus, for example, in 1986, two years before his change of mind on these other issues, Irving told reporters in Brisbane, Australia, that
the Jews were the victims of a large number of rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements which exist in Central Europe. Not just Germans, but Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, feeding on the endemic antisemitism of the era and encouraged by the brutalization which war brought about anyway. These people had seen the bombing raids begin. They’d lost probably women, wives and children in the bombing raids. And they wanted to take revenge on someone. So when Hitler ordered the expulsion, as he did–there’s no doubt that Hitler ordered the expulsion measures–these people took it out on the person that they could.77
Irving did not explain how Allied bombing raids on Germany had turned Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians against the Jews. The extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe during the war, he repeated in 1988, in places like Minsk and Kiev and Riga, was “conducted for the most ordinary and repugnant motives of greed and thievery” by “individual gangsters and criminals,” for whom the German state and people could not be held responsible.78 In fact, of course, even those responsible on the ground for directing and carrying out the actual killing operations were not ‘nameless’ and most of them were not ‘criminals’ in the sense of having previous convictions; they were responsible officials acting on behalf of the Nazi state and Nazi agencies such as the SS and the police.
As so often when he dealt with these questions, Irving abandoned the pretence of original research and resorted to speculation and innuendo. Testifying at the 1988 Zündel trial, for example, Irving said he was
puzzled at the apparent lack of logic: that the Nazis are supposed to have had a government policy for the deliberate, ruthless, systematic extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz and other places of murder and yet tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jews passed through these camps and are, I am glad to say, alive and well amongst us now to testify to their survival. So either the Nazis had no such programme or they were an exceedingly sloppy race, which isn’t the image we have of them today. It’s another of the logical questions which is being asked in this history which the historians hitherto have not asked.
“I don’t think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews,” he repeated later on the same occasion.79 Of course, his argument here was fallacious. Auschwitz was both a labor camp and an extermination camp, so it is not surprising that many Jews interned there survived the experience. On the other hand, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, and Sobibor, which was presumably what Irving meant by “other places of murder,” were designed purely for extermination; Irving presented no evidence to show that any Jews at all survived from these camps, which is not surprising, for hardly any did.
Irving disputed the view, commonly held among historians, that the Wannsee Conference, a meeting of senior officials held on 20 January 1942, drew up statistics of Jews in many European countries who were to be taken to Eastern Europe for extermination, either in the near future or, later, when, as evidently expected, these countries fell into German hands. Irving told the 1988 Zündel trial:
Several of the participants in the Wannsee Conference subsequently testified in later criminal proceedings that . . . none of them had an idea that at that conference there had been a discussion of liquidation of Jews. . . There is no explicit reference to extermination of the Jews of Europe in the Wannsee Conference, not in any of the other documents in that file.
This was a classic instance of the Holocaust denial technique described by Vidal-Naquet, of taking the euphemistic language of Nazism at face value, but casting doubt on any source that avoided euphemisms and spoke directly and in unvarnished terms about murder and extermination. In fact, like others familiar with the Wannsee Conference minutes, I was aware of the fact that Eichmann testified in 1961 that the talk at the Conference had all been of killing and liquidation, disguised in the minutes (written by Eichmann himself but checked over and amended by Heydrich) by euphemisms.80
However, Eichmann, said Irving, without any evidence for his claim and forgetting how he had relied on the Nazi bureaucrat’s 1961 testimony on other occasions, “got confused about what he really recalled and what he had in the meantime been told.” “I don’t now believe,” Irving said in 1988, “there was anything you could describe as ‘extermination machinery’ other than the very disorganized ad hoc efforts of the criminals and murderers among the SS who were carrying out the liquidations that we described earlier.”81 This was a familiar part of the litany of Holocaust denial. One of the earliest Holocaust deniers, Paul Rassinier, had also described “the systematic mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers” as an “infamous accusation” invented by the Jews.82 Another Holocaust denier, Austin J. App, had similarly asserted that there was no “single document, order, blue-print” demonstrating the Nazis’ intention of murdering the Jews, and went on to argue, as Irving later did, that the Nazis were so efficient that the fact that some Jews undoubtedly survived proves that they never had any intention of murdering them all: had they wanted to, “they would have done so.”83 Speculation such as this struck me as wild, indeed almost desperate in its attempt to distract attention from the hard evidence of various kinds that pointed to the extermination program having been large-scale, systematic, and comprehensive in intent.
Reading through the work of Holocaust deniers like Arthur Butz, it was clear that they wanted their readers to believe that the evidence for the Holocaust was fabricated. In a number of speeches and writings, Irving claimed that the ‘Holocaust legend’ was invented by the Political Warfare Executive of the British Government. “British intelligence,” he said in Toronto on 13 August 1988, “deliberately masterminded the gas chamber lie.” “Who invented the myth of the gas chambers?” he asked rhetorically in Moers on 9 March 1990. His answer? “We did it. The English. We invented the lie about the gas chambers, just as we invented the lie about the Belgian children with their hands hacked off in the First World War.”84 Repeated over the BBC, this myth, Irving claimed, was soon common currency among the Germans:
There’s hardly a German who hasn’t been listening clandestinely to the BBC who hasn’t heard about the gas chambers. And they begin mentioning it in rumours to each other. From one washerwoman to the next, the rumour goes around Germany, until finally they’ve actually seen about it and their son’s working in a unit and he’s heard about it, too. And that’s how the legend gains credibility from the German side too.85
So where did Irving believe that the gas-chamber ‘story’ originated? In extracts from the forthcoming second volume of his Churchill biography Irving wrote that it was supplied to the British in 1942 by Gerhard Riegner, director of the Geneva Office of the World Jewish Congress from 1939 until 1945.86 The Foreign Office disbelieved Riegner; the whole story might have been invented. So when the British used the story as propaganda, they knew it to be untrue. This was already some distance from Irving’s claim that they had invented it themselves.
What was the real documentary evidence for this account? I checked it out in the British Public Record Office, in Kew, just to the west of London. The documents were well known and a number of other historians such as Sir Martin Gilbert, author of Auschwitz and the Allies, published as long ago as 1981, had cited them before. They revealed that on 8 August 1942, Riegner informed the Foreign Office that he had been told by a well-connected German that the Nazis were intending to exterminate 3 to 4 million Jews.87 The methods under consideration included Prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide).88 Foreign Office mandarins were reluctant to make use of “this story” in British propaganda against Germany “without further confirmation.”89 In a minute of 27 August Roger Allen of the Foreign Office wrote:
This [Polish] aide-mémoire [on which the declaration was based] is in line with a good deal of information which we have received from time to time. There can, I think, be little doubt that the general picture painted is pretty true to life. On the other hand it is of course extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to check up on the specific instances or matters of detail. For this reason I feel a little unhappy about the statement to be issued on the authority of His Majesty’s Government, that Poles “are now being systematically put to death in gas chambers.”
Allen considered that reports of gassings “may or may not be true, but in any event I submit we are putting out a statement on evidence which is far from conclusive, and which we have no means of assessing.”90 Another Foreign Office mandarin, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, added:
In my opinion it is incorrect to describe Polish information regarding German atrocities as “trustworthy.” The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up. They seem to have succeeded.
Mr. Allen and myself have both followed German atrocities quite closely. I do not believe that there is any evidence which would be accepted in a Law Court that Polish children have been killed on the spot by Germans when their parents were being deported to work in Germany, nor that Polish children have been sold to German settlers. As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers, I do not believe there is any evidence that this has been done. There may have been stories to this effect, and we have played them up in P.[olitical] W. [arfare] E. [xecutive] rumours without believing that they had any foundation. At any rate there is far less evidence than exists for the mass murder of Polish officers by the Russians at Katyn. On the other hand we do know that the Germans are out to destroy the Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour.
I think that we weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence. These mass executions in gas chambers remind me of the story of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie and led to true stories of German enormities being brushed aside as being mere propaganda.91
The Foreign Office’s doubts were telegraphed to Washington the same day:
On further reflection we are not convinced that evidence regarding the use of gas chambers is substantial enough to justify inclusion in a public declaration of concluding phrase of paragraph 2 of draft and would prefer if United States agree, that sentence in question should end at “concentration camps.”92
As requested, the original declaration issued on 30 August stood, save that it duly read that some children were “despatched with the women and old men to concentration camps.”93
There was no evidence here or anywhere else, indeed, that the British Political Warfare Executive had invented the story of the gas chambers: they had on the contrary received a report from people with contacts in Central Europe about them. Nor was there any evidence that the Foreign Office considered reports of gassings to be a lie; they were simply unsure about them. Moreover, their real doubts related to claims that Poles were being gassed. Even Cavendish-Bentinck agreed that the Germans were “out to destroy the Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour.”
But Irving’s speeches went much further than this in their allegations. Irving also asserted that following on this supposed propaganda lie, further evidence for the Holocaust was fabricated after the end of the Second World War.94 This included the eyewitness testimony of the thousands of former camp inmates and survivors of the Nazi extermination program. In his videotaped lecture The Search for Truth in History, Irving, said his supporter Nigel Jackson, spoke of the alleged eyewitnesses to the Auschwitz extermination machine “with sympathy,” suggesting they had fallen prey to distortions of memory and to pressure on the part of their listeners to have the legend justified. He said that eyewitness testimony had to be submitted to psychiatric or psychological examination.95 In an interview with the right-wing magazine CODE in 1990, Irving, answering a question about how he would judge the credibility of Holocaust survivors, responded in similar fashion: “I say that the psychiatrists should concern themselves with this matter some time. There are many cases of mass hysteria.”96 “I’m afraid I have to say I wouldn’t consider what a survivor of Treblinka could tell me in 1988 to be credible evidence,” he told the court at the second Zündel trial; one could not rely on “the very human and fallible human memories after a tragic wartime experience forty years after the event.”97 (Irving would have been lucky to have found such a survivor. Only fifty-four people are known to have survived of the million or so who entered the camp in 1942 and 1943; most of them escaped during an uprising of Jewish prisoners on 2 August 1943).98
Alleged extermination camp survivors would in Irving’s view go to considerable lengths to prove their stories, “even the ones who’ve got tattoo marks on their arms,” he told an audience at Latvian Hall, Toronto, on 8 November 1990:
Because the experts can look at a tattoo and say, “Oh yes, 181,219, that means you entered Auschwitz in March 1943.” So if you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I’m afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you’ve got to make sure (a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz, and (b) that it’s not a number which anyone has used before. (Laughter from the audience).99
“The eyewitnesses in Auschwitz . . . who claim to have seen the gas chambers,” he said in another lecture in 1991, “are liars.” They were “an interesting case for the psychiatrist. People over a period of years begin kidding themselves that they have seen something.” This was because they had been through a traumatic experience (Irving did not say what this was), and “being in the centre of a traumatic experience is liable to induce strange thoughts in eyewitnesses.”100
On another occasion he was even less “sympathetic.” People claimed to be eyewitnesses of the gas chambers and extermination camps, he told a Canadian audience in 1990, “particularly when there’s money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it”:
And the only way to overcome this appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere that surrounds the whole of this immense tragedy called World War II is to treat these little legends with the ridicule and bad taste that they deserve. Ridicule isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things like: “More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.” (Laughter in audience). You think that’s tasteless? What about this: (Laughter in audience) I’m forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try to kid people that they were in these concentration camps. It’s called “The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars”–”A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S.” (Laughter in audience). Can’t get more tasteless than that. But you’ve got to be tasteless because these people deserve all our contempt, and in fact they deserve the contempt of the real Jewish community and the people, whatever their class and colour, who did suffer.101
This was more than tasteless; and the laughter in the audience showed clearly what kind of people Irving was speaking to.
In 1995, Irving repeated the allegation: confronted with an alleged Holocaust survivor, he said, he would ask her “ ‘How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink?’ And I’ll say ‘Yes. Half-a-million dollars, three-quarters of a million dollars for you alone?’” “There are now hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of survivors. There are now millions of survivors. And I’m glad. But of course every survivor is living proof that there was no Nazi extermination programme.”102 In 1995 he repeated his claim that there were millions of survivors–“they defy all laws of natural decease and all laws of biology. The number of survivors is growing.”103
Irving never used eyewitness testimony from victims of Nazism in any of his voluminous writings; he hardly ever discussed it or even mentioned its existence. When confronted with actual survivors, he picked on technical aspects of their testimony that he tried to use to discredit their memories. A discussion with a survivor in a program broadcast on Australian television in 1997, for example, included the following exchange:
IRVING:You said you saw the smoke coming from the crematoria.
SURVIVOR: Absolutely.
IRVING: Is that correct?
SURVIVOR: Correct.
IRVING: But crematoria don’t smoke, Mrs. Altman. Go and visit your local crematorium in Sydney.104
The thought that the crematoria of Auschwitz might have been designed differently, and with less regard to the susceptibilities of onlookers and neighbors, than the crematoria in Sydney, did not, apparently, enter his mind.
Why, then, did Irving think that such evidence had been concocted? Who could possibly have gone to all the immense trouble necessary to fabricate such a vast quantity of documentary material? Describing various versions of Holocaust denial in 1986, Gill Seidel remarked in her pioneering survey of the subject:
They all purport to show that Jews are liars and tricksters holding the world to ransom and continuing to extract war reparations. This is a continuation and an extension of the anti-Jewish prejudices and practices. The implication is that after all this time Jews are still liars, parasites, extraordinar[il]y powerful, and fundamentally dishonest–and that maybe Hitler was right.105
As I read Irving’s writings and transcripts of his speeches dating from the 1990s, it became clear that after his conversion in 1988 he moved rapidly into line with these views. Fundamentally, he seemed to believe–against all the evidence of the massive amount of scholarly research carried out by non-Jewish historians in many countries–that the history of the Nazi extermination of the Jews had been written by Jewish historians. Thus he could refer, as he did in 1993, to “we independent historians, shall we say, the non-Jewish historians, the ones with an entirely open mind,” as if all non-Jewish historians agreed with him.106 Such agreement existed only in Irving’s fantasy.
The political thrust behind such strange views became apparent when I read the following passage in Irving’s preface to the English edition of the Leuchter Report, published by his Focal Point publishing house:
Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved (Since 1949 the State of Israel has received over 90 billion Deutschmarks in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the “gas chambers of Auschwitz”). And this myth will not die easily: Too many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well-financed and brilliantly successful post-war publicity campaign which followed on from the original ingenious plan of the British Psychological (sic) Warfare Executive (PWE) in 1942 to spread to the world the propaganda story that the Germans were using “gas chambers” to kill millions of Jews and other “undesirables.”
“The ‘big lie,’” he declared in 1991, referring to the Holocaust, “allows Jewish fraudsters to escape unpunished and Israel to torture Arabs and ignore UN resolutions.” And who were these Jewish fraudsters? “The big lie is designed to justify both in arrears and in advance the bigger crimes in the financial world elsewhere that are being committed by the survivors of the Holocaust.”107 The idea that survivors were engaged in large-scale financial fraud was new to me. I could not find any evidence in Irving’s writings and speeches to support this sweeping claim.
On 7 July 1992 The Guardian printed an interview with Irving in which, consistently with views he expressed elsewhere, Irving predicted that
one year from now the Holocaust will have been discredited. That prediction is lethal because of the vested interests involved in the Holocaust industry. As I said to the Jewish Chronicle, if a year from now the gas chamber legend collapses, what will that mean for Israel? Israel is drawing millions of dollars each year from the German taxpayer, provided by the German government as reparation for the gas chambers. It is also drawing millions from American taxpayers, who put up with it because of the way the Israelis or the Jews suffered. No one’s going to like it when they find out that for 50 years they have been believing a legend based on baloney.108
Irving’s confidence was misplaced. Moreover, many of his points were already familiar to me from a reading of the older Holocaust denial literature. The allegation that the Jews had used the Holocaust story to win reparations from the Germans could also be found in the texts of Paul Rassinier.109 Austin J. App similarly argued that the Jews had “used the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany into ‘atoning’ with the twenty billion dollars of indemnities to Israel.”110 In fact, the true figure was $735 million; and the money was paid for resettlement of survivors, not as compensation for the dead; had the state of Israel actually wanted to maximize the amount of reparations, then, as Deborah Lipstadt pointed out, the state of Israel would have tried to argue that–as Irving himself tried to argue–millions of Jews were not killed by the Nazis, but fled to Israel instead.111
Irving of course denied being ‘anti-Jewish’ or ‘anti-Israel,’ just as he denied being a Holocaust denier. Speaking in Canada in November 1992, he told his audience: “I am not an antisemite.”112 But he realized that his ideas opened him up to the obvious accusation that he was:
INTERVIEWER: When one reads your speeches, one has the impression that Churchill was paid by the Jews, that the Jews dragged Britain into the war, that many of the Communist regimes have been dominated by Jews subsequently, and that a great deal of control over the world is exercised by Jews.
IRVING: Right, these are four separate facts, to each of which I would be willing to put my signature. They are four separate and unrelated facts. When you string them together like that, you might be entitled then to say: “Question five, David Irving, are you therefore an antisemite?” This may well have been–
INTERVIEWER: No, this wasn’t my question.
IRVING: But the answer is this, these are in fact four separate facts which happen to be true, in my considered opinion as a historian. And I think we can find the historical evidence for it.113
From the end of the 1980s, Irving began referring to Jews as “our traditional enemies.”114 Who these precisely were, he made clear in a speech given in 1992: “our old traditional enemies . . . (are) the great international merchant banks (who) are controlled by people who are no friends of yours and mine,” people who were “annoyed” by sixty-foot posters advertising the Sunday Times serialization of the Goebbels diaries “in all the Jewish ghettos of Great Britain.”
Later in the speech he attacked the “odd and ugly and perverse and greasy and slimy community of ‘anti-Fascists’ that run the very real risk of making the word fascist respectable by their own appearance!”115 His particular venom seemed to be reserved for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to whom he referred in 1991 as “cockroaches.”116 “I never used to believe in the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy,” he said. “I’m not even sure now if there’s an international Jewish conspiracy. All I know is that people are conspiring internationally against me, and they do mostly turn out to be . . . (drowned out by laughter and applause).”117 In April 1998 he spoke of American Jews
“moving into the same positions of predominance and influence (media, banking, business, entertainment, and the more lucrative professions like law, medical and dentistry) that they held in Weimar Germany, which gave rise to the hatreds and the resulting pogroms; and that this being so, twenty or thirty more years might see in the USA the same dire consequences as happened in Nazi Germany.”118
This was the classic language of antisemitism that I had encountered in reading texts from German antisemites from the late nineteenth century on: “ghettos,” “greasy and slimy,” “lucrative professions,” “cockroaches,” “international Jewish conspiracy.” The use of the term ghettos, for example, suggested in standard racist manner that there were districts in Great Britain where Jews were in a majority and, by implication, not integrated into the wider society in which they lived. In fact, such ghettos existed nowhere in the United Kingdom. Irving’s language expressed the classic ideology of antisemitism too, with its attempt to whip up jealousies and hatreds of Jews by portraying them–without a shred of evidence–as exerting predominance over key professions and institutions (although why this should have been a cause for pogroms, or indeed objections from anybody, Irving did not say). This alleged ‘predominance,’ in the view of Holocaust deniers, was behind the continuing widespread public acceptance of what they called the ‘Holocaust myth.’119
Indeed, some of Irving’s own speeches contained a veiled threat of violence against Jews in the future as a result of his own ‘exposure’ of the Holocaust ‘myth’:
And gradually the word is getting around in Germany (Irving said in 1991). Two years there from now too the German historians will accept that we’re right. They will accept that for fifty years they have believed a lie. And then there will come about a result not only in Germany, but around the world, which I deeply regret and abhor. There will be an immense tidal wave of antisemitism. It’s an inevitable result. And when people point an accusing finger at me and say, “David Irving, you are creating antisemitism,” I have to say, “It is not the man who speaks the truth who creates the antisemitism, it’s the man who invented the lie of the legend in the first place.” (Applause).120
Irving’s crocodile tears were not to be taken too seriously. For in 1996, recounting the view of the publisher who eventually refused to publish the American edition of his book on Goebbels, Irving said:
Maybe . . . the chairman of St. Martin’s Press was right when he said: “This book suggests they (the Jews) had it coming to them.” But if he’s right, let me say in advance in my self-defence, it isn’t David Irving who says that, it’s David Irving reporting Dr. Goebbels who says that. Maybe I didn’t make it plain enough, or maybe I didn’t put enough distance between myself and Dr. Goebbels, or maybe I didn’t put in all the counter-arguments I should have done to be politically correct.121
Fundamentally, however, as Irving conceded, he was in basic agreement with Goebbels in his belief that “they had it coming to them.” For, Irving told an audience in Tampa, Florida, on 6 October 1995, referring to the Jews:
What these people don’t understand . . . is that they are generating antisemitism by their behaviour, and they can’t understand it. They wonder where the antisemitism comes from and it comes from themselves, from their behaviour. . . . I said to this man from Colindale, this leader of the Jewish community in Freeport, Louisiana, I said . . . “You are disliked, you people. You have been disliked for three thousand years. You have been disliked so much that you have been hounded from country to country, from pogrom to purge, from purge back to pogrom, and yet you never asked yourselves why you’re disliked. That’s the difference between you and me. It never occurs to you to look into the mirror and say, why am I disliked? What is it that the rest of humanity doesn’t like about the Jewish people, to such an extent that they repeatedly put us through the grinder?” And he went beserk. He said: “Are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz? Ourselves?” And I said, “Well the short answer is yes. The short answer I have to say is yes. . . . If you had behaved differently over the intervening three thousand years, the Germans would have gone about their business and not have found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to you.122
Thus whatever atrocities Irving admitted had been suffered by the Jews over the centuries had been mainly their own fault.
After all, he said in 1991, “they (meaning the Jews) dragged us into two world wars and now, for equally mysterious reasons, they’re trying to drag us into the Balkans.”123 Here too, in the 1990s, the machinations of a Jewish conspiracy seemed to be at work. Irving was confronted with his various statements along these lines in 1996:
INTERVIEWER: At times in your speech to these groups you speak at, you ask if the Jews have ever looked at themselves to find a reason for the pogroms and the persecutions and the extermination. In other words, you’re asking, “did they bring it on themselves?”
IRVING: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Thereby excusing the Germans, the Nazis.
IRVING: Let us ask that simple question: why does it always happen to the Jews? . . .
INTERVIEWER: But isn’t that an ugly, racist sentiment?
IRVING: It is an ugly, of course it’s an ugly, racist sentiment. Of course it is. You’re absolutely right. But you can’t just say, therefore let’s not discuss it, therefore let’s not open that can of worms in case we find something inside there that we don’t like looking at.
After all this, it was not surprising that he considered that “the Madagascar solution would probably have been the most peaceful for the present world,” because the Jews “would have had no neighbours, nobody who they could feel intimidated by, and of course, nobody whom they in turn could intimidate.” In fact, as recent research had made clear, Irving was glossing over the fact that the Nazi regime, in drawing up its never realized plans to deport the Jews there in the early part of the war, would have made no provision to supply them with food and clothing and the basic necessities of life, and that the climate and economy of the island were entirely unsuited to sustaining millions of mostly highly urbanized European settlers.124
Irving thus shared the common position of Holocaust deniers that evidence for the Holocaust has been fabricated. He augmented these arguments with a wider range of assertions about the Jews’ alleged influence in the postwar world, and their supposed responsibility for provoking attacks on themselves, assertions which in style and content could fairly be called antisemitic.
Was Lipstadt right to charge Irving with maintaining connections to Holocaust deniers? The most important organization propagating Holocaust denial had for many years been the so-called Institute for Historical Review, based in California. I collected information about the Institute from a variety of sources, most notably its publications held, along with other right-wing literature, in London’s Wiener Library, a German-Jewish emigré institution devoted to the study of Nazism and fascism. Other details, not disputed by Irving, were presented in Deborah Lipstadt’s own thorough investigation of the Institute in the book that was at the center of the trial. All of this made clear that the Institute’s main business was propagating in a pseudo-academic form the idea that there were no gas chambers, there was no systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, there were no 6 million dead.
In her book, Lipstadt cited a resolution passed at the Institute’s first convention, held in Los Angeles in 1979, declaring that “the facts surrounding the allegations that gas chambers existed in occupied Europe during World War II are demonstrably false,” and stating its belief that “the whole theory of ‘the holocaust’ has been created by and promulgated by political Zionism for the attainment of political and economic ends, specifically the continued and perpetual support of the military aggression of Israel by the people of Germany and the US.” The resolution urged the U.S. Congress to investigate, among other things, “deceitful wartime propaganda masquerading as fact . . . and the truth of the alleged extermination of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II.”125
The Institute for Historical Review purported from the outset to be a respectable academic body. In 1980, it began publishing a quarterly magazine, The Journal of Historical Review. Leafing through its pages in the Wiener Library, I noticed its classic academic format: plain covers, no color pictures, and lengthy articles with an elaborate apparatus of footnotes and bibliographies. The Editorial Advisory Committee of the journal included many prominent Holocaust deniers, most notably Arthur R. Butz, Robert Faurisson, and Wilhelm Staeglich. Articles in the Journal of Historical Review had titles such as “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth,”126 “The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews,”127 “How Many Jews Died in the German Concentration Camps?” (the author’s answer was between 300,000 and 600,000), and so on.128 The overall thrust of the journal’s efforts was to present a wide variety of arguments in support of the thesis that, to quote one article among many, “the Holocaust story is absurd.”129 Thus for example it dedicated a special issue to an attempt to vindicate the Leuchter Report,130 carried an article with the title “Neither Trace Nor Proof: The Seven Auschwitz ‘Gassing’ Sites,”131 and devoted several issues and numerous articles to attempting to demonstrate that nobody was ever gassed at Auschwitz.132 Another article in the journal underlined Holocaust deniers’ tendency to inflate the influence of Jews in the postwar world by claiming that “Judaism, through the ‘Holocaust’ cult, has become the informal state religion of the West.”133 The centrality of Holocaust denial to the Institute for Historical Review and its journal could not be doubted.
Irving claimed in his written submission to the court that the Institute was a respectable and nonextremist institution whose board members held established academic qualifications; they were not antisemites or racists or ultra-right-wing. However, their academic qualifications were not in history but in other fields. Butz was an engineer, Faurisson a specialist in French literature, Staeglich qualified as a lawyer, and so on. None of them was an established professional historian, academic or otherwise. Moreover, the journal and its parent institute had a political rather than an academic background. They were founded and owned by the Noontide Press, whose proprietor, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom Inc., was owned in turn by Willis Allison Carto, a leading proponent of Holocaust denial. Carto’s main publication was the extreme right-wing journal Spotlight, described by Irving in 1982 as an excellent publication. Irving was already familiar with Carto and his “efficient and dedicated staff” by the early 1980s and was well aware of what he publicly referred to as “the ties that exist between the Liberty Lobby and the Institute of Historical Review.”134 The booking for the Institute’s opening convention in September 1979 was made by Noontide Press, under the name of Lewis Brandon, a pseudonym for David McCalden, formerly a leading light in a racist breakaway from the extreme right-wing political organization the British National Front, founded in 1975.135 McCalden, who also wrote under the name David Berg, was director of the Institute for Historical Review from 1978 until 1981 and a self-confessed ‘racialist.’136 Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the Institute organized regular conferences and actively propagated its academic image, while it remained in effect a subordinate part of Willis Carto’s much larger and better-funded Liberty Lobby nexus.
Its dependence on Carto for much of its effectiveness was dramatically revealed in 1993, when a multimillion-dollar bequest became the subject of vicious infighting between Carto and the Institute’s staff. Eleven lawsuits took up a massive amount of time, energy, and money, and agreements that the cover organization of the Institute, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, would get 45 percent of the legacy, or, later, that Carto would hand over to it $1.2 million, did not seem to have been honored. The Legion and the Institute did manage to wrest control of its board from Carto, and in January 1993 the journal dropped its pseudo-academic format. After that, it was published as a bi-monthly illustrated glossy magazine. Its contents and its basic thrust, however, did not change.137 Carto’s response revealed once more the paranoia that permeated such circles on the extreme right. He not only fired back in his magazine Spotlight the accusation that the Institute had been taken over by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League–a charge to which, not surprisingly, some of those who supported the existing line of the Institute and its journal strongly objected–but evidently also withdrew his financial backing, for in 1995 the Institute and the journal were forced to admit that they were in financial difficulties because of what the journal editors Mark Weber and Greg Raven called “the massive theft of IHR money by former associates.”138
In February 1994 the Institute’s staff secured and circulated endorsements of their line from six leading supporters: Robert Faurisson, Ernst Zündel, Bradley R. Smith, James J. Martin, Arthur J. Butz, and David Irving. Irving’s endorsement praised the journal as “sincere, balanced, objective, and devoid of polemics” and its editors and staff as “staunch and unflinching soldiers in what our brave comrade Robert Faurisson has called ‘this great adventure,’” meaning of course the ‘adventure’ of Holocaust denial.139 However, the Institute never really recovered, since it now lacked the financial backing and know-how that Carto and his organization had provided. Its conferences, its journal, and its book-publishing and bookselling operation declined sharply from its heyday in the 1980s.140 The journal also failed to regain the image of academic respectability it had so vigorously propagated earlier.
Like many individual Holocaust deniers, the Institute as a body denied that it was involved in Holocaust denial. It called this a smear that was “completely at variance with the facts” because ‘revisionst scholars’ such as Faurisson, Butz, “and bestselling British historian David Irving acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as direct and indirect result of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies.” But the concession that a relatively small number of Jews were killed was routinely used by Holocaust deniers to distract attention from the far more important fact of their refusal to admit that the figure ran into millions, and that a large proportion of these victims were systematically murdered by gassing as well as by shooting.
Irving denied that he was affiliated to the Institute in any formal capacity, and this was, strictly speaking, true. He was a member neither of its board nor of the editorial advisory board of its journal. However, his informal connections with the Institute and the journal were extremely close and were maintained over a considerable period of time. He was a frequent visitor to the regular conferences organized by the Institute for Historical Review. He spoke at the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth conferences in succession. It was hardly surprising that in 1993 the editor of the journal described him as “a good friend of the Institute.”141 There were articles about Irving in the fourth and sixth issues of volume 13 of the journal. Irving printed an advance copy of his introduction to the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War in the journal, alongside a reassessment of Rommel and a scurrilous attack on Sir Winston Churchill (“almost a pervert–a man who liked to expose himself to people”). The first issue of volume 13 included one article by Irving and two others about him. The next issue had another article by Irving, and he also printed two more articles in the first issue of volume 15. Before he established his website on the Internet, it would not be going too far to describe the journal as the principal forum in which Irving disseminated work shorter than book-length but longer than a newspaper letter or article. This was certainly the case at the time when Lipstadt completed her book in 1993.142
Irving gladly continued to lend his support to the efforts of the Journal of Historical Review to win more subscribers. A leaflet advertising the journal carried a photograph of Irving and quoted him as follows: “The Journal of Historical Review has an astounding record of fearlessly shattering the icons of those vested interests who hate and fear truth. That is why I strongly endorse it . . . and suggest that every intelligent man and woman in America, Britain, and the dominions subscribe.”143 The Institute repaid this service. In the January–February issue of volume 13, a full-page spread was headed: “David Irving: Institute for Historical Review: Your Source for David Irving’s Masterworks.” After listing and describing five of his books and picturing the cover of each, the advertisement enjoined readers to “Order these fine books from the Institute for Historical Review,” and gave the address.144 Irving had close relations with leading figures at the Institute and included correspondence with them in his Discovery.145
In his reply to the defense, Irving maintained that lecturing at the conferences of the Institute for Historical Review did not associate him with Holocaust denial. He claimed that other lecturers had included not just Holocaust deniers but writers not concerned with this field at all, such as the Canadian journalist James Bacque, whom Irving described in 1991 as “a very good friend of mine.”146 James Bacque gained brief notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s not for Holocaust denial, in which he had never been involved, but for his book, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II, published in 1979. This publication alleged that the Americans under General Eisenhower deliberately starved to death over a million German prisoners at the end of the Second World War–a thesis which might have made its author an obvious person to invite to a conference of Holocaust deniers, given their need to establish that Allied war crimes were as bad as, or worse than, German war crimes. In fact, the book’s claims, which gained some credence on its publication through the appearance of careful archival research, were quickly challenged.147 Another book by James Bacque claimed that the American occupation authorities deliberately starved to death as many as 9 million German civilians after the end of the Second World War.148 Whatever Bacque’s credibility as a historian, however, the fact was that he never spoke at an Institute conference or contributed to the Institute’s journal or associated himself with Holocaust deniers or antisemites in any way. Bacque actually wrote to me after the trial, indignantly saying that he wanted nothing to do with antisemites of this or any other kind. I checked out the lists of conference speakers in the Journal of Historical Review and his name did not feature in any of them. The claim that he spoke at one or more of the Institute’s conferences was pure invention on Irving’s part.
Irving also pointed out that he had had disputes with well-known ‘revisionists’ like Robert Faurisson, and so by implication was not one of them. It was undoubtedly the case that Irving had his disagreements with Faurisson in particular. This was certainly true when he spoke to the Institute’s conference in 1983, before his conversion to hard-core Holocaust denial.149 By the early 1990s, Irving’s and Faurisson’s positions had converged, they were agreeing on the essentials, and they were only disputing minor points of disagreement within the Holocaust denial theses.150 Irving praised Faurisson in 1991 as “a very distinguished intellectual in my mind, a very brave man indeed.”151 Irving made use of an article by Faurisson in the Journal of Historical Review in his book on Nuremberg.152 In 1995 Irving referred to himself as part of this wider movement, “people like myself and the brave band of scientists, and writers, and journalists, and historians who have gradually fallen in. I won’t say they’ve fallen in behind me because I’m not going to try and place myself at the head of this revisionist movement. They’ve fallen in shoulder-to-shoulder with us and are marching at our side in this extraordinarily interesting adventure.”153 By the middle of the 1990s Irving was talking to members of the Institute for Historical Review in terms of “we revisionists.”154 In all of their work, those associated with the Institute sought to avoid being labeled Holocaust deniers by describing themselves as ‘revisionists,’ and Irving’s appropriation of this label to himself, and his association of his work with theirs, clearly indicated that he regarded himself as one of their number.
Despite all this, not everyone who studied Irving’s writings and speeches in the 1990s reached the conclusion that he had become a consistent and undeviating Holocaust denier. The American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, interviewing Irving for his book Explaining Hitler, published in 1998, concluded that “Irving’s stance in relation to Holocaust denial has seemed to waver confusingly back and forth in the time since I encountered him.” On occasion, wrote Rosenbaum, Irving, for example in his Goebbels biography, “seems to argue that the Holocaust, or at least mass killings of Jews, did happen . . . that there was some deliberate killing of Jews, perhaps a hundred thousand or so, but mainly wildcat, unauthorized actions in the blood heat of the fighting on the eastern front.”155 Moreover, in the course of his conversation with Rosenbaum, Irving admitted of some Holocaust deniers “that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites,” and that he only spoke at their meetings because “I’ve been denied a platform worldwide. . . . I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm,” he confessed, without actually saying who he meant by this or what kind of damage or harm he was referring to.156 This was enough for Norman Stone, sometime professor of modern history at Oxford University and author of a brief popular biography of Hitler, in reviewing Rosenbaum’s book, to conclude that “Irving . . . puts some blue water between himself and the nutty ‘revisionists’ who claimed the Holocaust never happened . . . even Irving is not blind to the facts.”
However, Stone could only reach this rather startling conclusion by overlooking Rosenbaum’s statement in the same chapter that “to an ever-increasing extent, Irving has become a fiery rabble-rousing Führer of the Holocaust-denial movement.” In addition, Rosenbaum made it quite clear that Irving denied that people were deliberately killed at Auschwitz and other camps by gassing, and cited his Action Report newsletters “which” (Rosenbaum commented sarcastically) “seem to cater to his ‘temporary’ cracked anti-Semite allies and Holocaust deniers.”157 No “clear blue water” there, then. And why in any case should Irving have described the members of the Institute of Historical Review–for to whom else could he have been referring?–in such unflattering words when, as we have seen, he had endorsed its work in such ringing terms in 1994? Moreover, Irving’s claim that mass killings of Jews did happen on a moderate scale hardly put “clear blue water” between himself and the Holocaust deniers either. His admission that a hundred thousand Jews were killed in largely unco-ordinated acts of war on the Eastern Front did not constitute an admission of the reality of the Holocaust in any meaningful or generally accepted sense of the term.
Some other distinguished experts on Nazi Germany had told me firmly that they did not believe Irving was a Holocaust denier. But when I looked closely at Irving’s speeches and writings since the late 1980s, I could not escape the conclusion that he had become a Holocaust denier in 1988. He clearly held all four central beliefs of the deniers as defined at the beginning of this chapter. He argued that the number of Jews deliberately killed by the Nazis was far less than 6 million; it amounted to only a few hundred thousand, and was thus similar to, or less than, the number of German civilians killed in Allied bombing raids, which he portrayed as crimes of a similar or greater order. He argued that gas chambers were not used to kill large numbers of Jews at any time. If Jews did die in large numbers, it was as a result of epidemics for which the Allied bombing raids were in large measure responsible. If there was any wavering by Irving on these points, it was after the publication of Lipstadt’s book; even here, however, insofar as it could be observed at all, it appeared to be more a matter of presentation than of content.
Irving continued to assert, as he had already done prior to 1988, that the Nazi state had no concerted policy of exterminating Europe’s Jews; all the Nazi leadership, Hitler at its head, wished to do was to deport them to Eastern Europe. He alleged that the Holocaust was a myth invented by Allied propaganda during the war and sustained since then by Jews who wished to use it to gain political and financial support for the state of Israel or even for themselves. The supposed evidence for the Nazis’ wartime mass murder of millions of Jews by gassing and other means, he claimed, was fabricated after the war. He referred repeatedly to the ‘Holocaust myth’ and the ‘Holocaust legend’ and described himself as engaged in a “refutation of the Holocaust story.”
Irving was far from being a lone figure or an original, isolated researcher in this field. He had close contacts with virtually all the major Holocaust deniers, including Faurisson and Butz and the Institute for Historical Review. He was prosecuted for Holocaust denial in Germany and found guilty under German law. There was no doubt that he was a Holocaust denier. Indeed he himself came close at times to agreeing with the application of this description to himself. “Until 1988,” he told an audience in Calgary in 1991, “I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust.” But since then, he continued, it had been clear to him that “that story was just a legend.” It was not so much the label he rejected as its negative connotations–“Holocaust denier–as though there’s something wrong in refusing to accept . . . the whole story.”158