In which we explore the mind of Hitler’s “Ambassador to the Afterlife,” witness the “Hitler spell” in action, and meet, once again, Hitler as a newborn babe
Ringing the bell on the heavily fortified, high-tech-security-equipped entrance to David Irving’s living quarters on Duke Street in London, I couldn’t help recall Alan Bullock’s words on Irving. Bullock had taken great pains to make the point that his return to the polemical fray with a public lecture on Hitler’s role in the Holocaust had not been a direct or ad hominem response to David Irving’s vigorous advocacy of Hitler’s noninvolvement but was, rather, a response to Revisionists and Holocaust deniers in general. He didn’t want to dignify Irving as an opponent, as a representative of a legitimate rival school of historical explanation and interpretation.
But Bullock is fascinated or at least horrified by the phenomenon of Irving.
“He’s a real rabble-rouser,” Bullock says. “A real Hitler speaker.”
“A Hitler speaker?”
“Aye,” Bullock says, reverting to his native North Country accent in his contempt for David Irving, Hitler explainer turned Hitler defender.
“Aye, he goes over the top. He goes to Germany and whips it up.”
Bullock was referring to newspaper reports of David Irving addressing rallies of German sympathizers. I had one of those reports in my possession, a 1991 dispatch by Gitta Sereny, author of Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. She depicts Irving telling a Hamburg audience that in two years “this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majanek and Treblinka . . . which in fact never took place” will be laid to rest. “Two days later,” Sereny reports, Irving “delivered his message to a mob of tattooed flag-waving youths in the former East German city of Halle. The crowd shouted ‘Sieg Heil’ when he extolled the heroism of ‘that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess.’”
For all his mystical contemplation of the notion of Jesus embracing Judas, Bullock seems to see Irving as an unforgivable Judas to historical truth. Clearly, he simply despises him. “Strange little rascal,” Bullock said of Irving. We’d been talking about conscious evil. “I do think he was evil. He whips it up, and he knows he’s doing it.”
Is David Irving evil? If evil is a destination, Bullock believes Irving has already arrived at the station. I’m not sure. I believe I saw him at a moment when he’d reached the last stop before the terminal and was in the process of deciding whether to step off or go the distance.
Indeed, the decision-making process seemed to be going on before my eyes. It’s rare to see the defining moment of such a process enacted out loud, but that’s what I felt I was watching as I listened to Irving struggle with a fateful dilemma over a manuscript, one he is proud of discovering and yet wants to repudiate, delegitimize. Because it contains within it a refutation of the last two decades of his work. Because it contains that which Irving had long insisted would never be found, did not exist: evidence of Adolf Hitler’s personal order, the long-sought “Führerbefehl,” the directive ordering the extermination of the Jews. It was this manuscript, this decision process that led me to overcome my reservations about speaking to Irving when I was in London to talk to Bullock and Trevor-Roper. I wanted to know if Irving was, as he seemed to indicate in an interview with the Telegraph, seriously considering revising his Revisionist views.
The manuscript is a purported memoir by Adolf Eichmann, and a foot-thick photocopy of it was sitting on Irving’s desk and weighing heavily on his mind the afternoon I visited him in his study on Duke Street. Also on his desk was a bust of Goebbels and a tiny toy-soldier figure of Hitler.
Irving’s a tall, florid-faced fellow in country tweeds whose face can twitch when he becomes agitated. Which he often seemed to be in the course of our conversation. Particularly when it came to the dilemma of the Eichmann memoir.
Irving had established his reputation as a Hitler controversialist with the publication in 1977 of Hitler’s War, a book in which his professed aim was to describe the origin and conduct of the war through Hitler’s eyes, “from behind his desk.” Many acknowledge Irving’s diligence in digging up from German sources a large number of private papers, diaries, and documents long thought lost. “Whatever allegations may be levelled at Irving as a historian—and there have been many—there is no doubting his ability to sniff out original documents,” Robert Harris wrote in his account of the 1983 Hitler-diaries fiasco. Still, most rejected the conclusion Irving had been driving at ever since Hitler’s War: that the absence of any written order from Hitler to pursue the Final Solution proves that he didn’t order it and probably didn’t know about it.
In taking that position, he was going further—but not much further—than the more extreme functionalists among the German historians in the intentionalist-functionalist debate of the 1980s. The functionalists argue that while Hitler might have known of it, the Holocaust happened almost by spontaneous combustion, that it was the bureaucratic by-product of wartime circumstances and the complicity of Nazi leaders lower than Hitler in the hierarchy—Himmler and Heydrich, Göring and Goebbels along with regional authorities in the occupied eastern territories, acting largely on their own initiatives.
But in the twenty years since the publication of Hitler’s War, Irving’s views have undergone a shift or several shifts back and forth: from mild dissident to apparent agreement with radical Holocaust deniers, back to apparent assent to the fact of mass murder, albeit murder ordered by others than Hitler. On that he’s been consistent. Occasionally no Holocaust, always no Hitler.
And to an ever-increasing extent, Irving has come out from behind his desk to become a fiery rabble-rousing Führer of the Holocaust-denial movement, addressing adoring rallies in Germany and, not surprisingly, in Argentina. “He really whips it up,” Bullock had said, and indeed, on Irving’s desk is a videocassette whose slipcase is adorned with a graphic picture of Irving whipping it up in front of a crowd of cheering deniers, eerily conjuring up the figure he’s obsessed with.
In any case, it was at one of those rallies in Argentina that someone handed Irving a time bomb of a manuscript. It was evidently meant as a gift, a tribute from one believer in the cause to its leader, but the gift turned out to be a poisoned apple.
“The Jewish community in Argentina was foolish enough to denounce me in the national press as being a national socialist agitator,” Irving told me. “Whereupon things got interesting. I was immediately whisked out of my hotel and kept in an army villa because my host said that in Argentina when people call you names like that, they’re not fooling. The beneficial consequence was that at the end of the next meeting a guy came out to me with a brown-paper package. And he said, ‘You’re obviously the correct repository for these papers that we’ve been looking after since 1960 for the Eichmann family.’ See, the Eichmann family panicked when he was kidnapped in the streets. And they took all his private papers which they could find, that had any kind of bearing, put them into brown paper and gave them to a friend. Then he gave them to this man who gave them to me, who gave them to the German government. Who threw me in jail and called me all these things,” Irving adds, getting distracted by more recent events. (He was imprisoned briefly in Munich before being expelled from Germany as a Holocaust denier. A Munich court convicted him in 1992 of “slandering the murdered Jews.”)
“This is my photocopy of them,” he says, indicating a stack of papers. “I gave the original to the German government, but I made a good photocopy before I gave it to them.”
I asked Irving if he could show me the bombshell “Führer order” passage that’s been tormenting him ever since he came across the alleged Eichmann memoirs. He flips through the stack to a passage flagged by a yellow Post-It note.
“It’s rather mind-boggling. He [Eichmann] refers on many occasions to a discussion he had with Heydrich at the end of September or October 1941 in which Heydrich says, in quotation marks, these two lines [which Irving quotes from the manuscript]: ‘I come from the Reichführer [Himmler]. He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of the Jews.’”
It’s fairly unequivocal and, more disturbing to Irving, it appears in a memoir he believes written before Eichmann’s capture and trial testimony.
“He keeps coming back to it,” Irving tells me. “Comes back to it again and again. These flags . . .” he indicates the Post-It notes with which he’s marked other places where Eichmann recalls the order for the Final Solution.
“When did you first come upon this?” I asked him.
“Christmas Eve 1991,” Irving recalls. “It gave me—it rocked me back on my heels frankly because I thought ‘Oops!’” He laughs, trying to make a joke out of his discomfort. “How do you explain this one away?”
A good question. The quote, if authentic, knocks a hole not only in Irving’s then-current no-Holocaust position but also in his earlier no-Hitler-involvement-in-the-Holocaust position. It was deeply disturbing, Irving admits. “I had to tell myself, ‘Don’t be knocked off your feet by this one.’”
The obvious solution was to declare the Eichmann memoirs a forgery, consigning their revelations to the trash bin with the Hitler diaries. But Irving was committed to the authenticity of the Eichmann find, and furthermore, he claims, the authenticity has been verified by the German Federal Archives at Koblenz. (This is only partially true. A spokesman at the Koblenz archives told my researcher that the “memoirs” appear to be cobbled together from interviews with Eichmann by a sympathetic journalist and other sources.) Irving’s reputation as recoverer of lost Hitler treasures probably can’t stand another flip-flop. In the 1983 Hitler-diaries affair, Irving at first denounced the purported diaries as forgeries and then at the last minute switched and pronounced them real, precisely reversing Hugh Trevor-Roper’s switch but landing, unfortunately, on the wrong side.
Now, with the Eichmann memoirs, Irving portrayed himself as torn between his desire for vindication as a digger-up of authentic diary treasures and his position as a Hitler exonerator. He shared his dilemma with the London Sunday Telegraph in 1992 in a quote that made it seem as if he might be retreating from his no-gas-chamber position to a revision of his Revisionism: “Quite clearly this has given me a certain amount of food for thought and I will spend much of this year thinking about it. They [the memoirs] show that Eichmann believed there was a Führer order. . . . It makes me glad I’ve not adopted the narrow-minded approach that there was no Holocaust. I’ve never adopted that view. Eichmann describes in such very great detail that you have to accept there were mass exterminations.”
By the time I saw him, however, Irving’s year of reflection on the subject was over, and he was once again very close to denying the truth of the Eichmann memoirs rather than conceding Hitler had a role in the Holocaust. He unveils for me a strategy to discredit the Eichmann extermination-order statement without discrediting the memoirs as a whole: They aren’t counterfeit, but Eichmann could have been lying when he wrote them. Irving’s come up with a rather flimsy conceptual framework on which to hang his desire to disbelieve Eichmann’s words: the Suez crisis.
“I tried to apply the three criteria that Hugh Trevor-Roper thought were indispensable to reading documents,” Irving tells me. “Three questions you ask of a document: Was it genuine? Was it written by somebody who was in a position to know what he’s writing about? And why does this document exist? The third one is the crucial one with the Eichmann papers. He’s writing in 1956 at the time of the Suez crisis; we know because he refers to it. And 1956—he’s aware that any day now his cover may be blown and he may be arrested.”
It took me a while to figure out why the Suez crisis would suddenly cause Eichmann to believe his cover might be blown, but I believe Irving envisions Eichmann thinking that an Israeli conquest of Cairo (or capture of high-ranking Egyptian officers) might put Israelis in possession of intelligence files on the fugitive-Nazi network, from which Egypt had recruited scientists and weapons technicians—and thus lead them to Eichmann’s location.
From this far-fetched projection of Eichmann’s paranoia, Irving deduces that Eichmann “must have had sleepless nights, wondering what he’s going to do, what he’s going to say to get off the hook. And though he’s not consciously doing it, I think his brain is probably rationalizing in the background, trying to find alibis. The alibi that would have been useful to him in his own fevered mind would be if he could say that Hitler—all he did was carry out [Hitler’s] orders. And I’m certain that at some time Heydrich would have said something like that to assure him—Der Führer habt richt der Ausrottung der Juden befohlen—which is a typical Hitler phrase. When Hitler used the word ‘Ausrottung,’ it didn’t carry the connotation which the word ‘Ausrottung’ carries [now]. Which is very important to know. I’ve got a whole card index on Hitler’s use of the word ‘Ausrottung.’ But of course ‘Ausrottung’ means extirpation—weeding out something and discarding it. Get rid of it.”
It was only in reading over the transcript of this discourse that it occurred to me how transparently Irving was projecting his own dilemma about the Führer order onto his image of Eichmann’s thought-world during the Suez crisis: “He must have had sleepless nights wondering what he’s going to do, what he’s going to say to get off the hook. And although he’s not consciously doing it I think his brain is probably rationalizing in the background trying to find out alibis . . . in his own fevered mind.”
As Eichmann confronted the possibility of discovery and capture, so in his “sleepless nights,” in his fevered mind, David Irving confronted the possibility of refutation by his Eichmann discovery.
And the conclusion about the memoir he offers me now derives from his Suez fantasy: “The first thing one has to say, it’s not a document with sufficient evidentiary value to weigh very much in the balance against the other documents from the other direction, which are of evidentiary value. It’s one which gives me pause for thought, but having thought about it, I am inclined to say that it’s not enough on its own to tilt the balance.”
The pose, the rhetoric are that of the serious historian weighing “evidentiary value” in the balance, and yet the pose may be a counterfeit. According to a London paper, Irving confided that he is simply trying to manipulate the media. The balance has already been tilted. When he speaks of these “other documents from the other direction,” he implies the existence of documents that somehow prove or state Hitler did not issue an extermination order. But, in fact, those who take that position argue not from other documents but from an absence of documents—the unavailability of a signed, notarized Führer order for the Final Solution—an absence that in any case might only prove Hitler’s desire to conceal.
How did David Irving get to this point, tying himself into knots to exculpate Hitler? Some—not all—of the historians I’d asked about Irving spoke respectfully of his work in the seventies in unearthing previously unseen Hitler-era documents. I mentioned this to him.
“They think I’ve really gone round the bend now?” Irving half asked, half stated. He still has a peculiar concern for his reputation with other historians, a reputation which, as he put it to me, is “down to its uppers, but hasn’t yet worn through to the street.”
How did Irving go round that bend? From the way he described it to me, the crucial development was his attempt to break into the inner circle, or “the Magic Circle,” as he characterized it to me, of surviving former Hitler confidants. Once inside that Magic Circle, he encountered—he became a living example of—the continuing power of the Hitler spell.
There were, however, stirrings of skepticism about the conventional vision of Hitler as early as his wartime childhood, he tells me. “Unlike Americans, we English suffered great deprivations” during the Second World War, Irving tells me. He was born in 1938, and “we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people’s armies.” (The alternative to this irritating state of affairs, of course, was to live on an island occupied by Hitler’s army.)
What disturbed Irving, he tells me, was not the deprivation but the rationing of truth. “We saw the losses in Allied air fleets by watching the formations take off and return with great gaps in them” after bombing missions, he said. “You know these things, but they wouldn’t report them in the press.” And in the papers, there were the caricatures of the Nazis which led him to question official truths. “There was a magazine at that time rather like Life but in England called the Picture Post. And every issue had a caricature box rather like ‘Doonesbury’—that kind of layout—and it was called ‘Arthur Ferrier’s Search Light,’ a box of various little caricatures usually dominated by the Nazi figures. There was fat old Göring and Hitler with his postman’s hat, and there was Dr. Goebbels, who was shorter and had one leg shorter. And it seemed to me at that time, as a youngster, there was something odd in the fact that these cartoon characters were able to inflict so much indignity and deprivation on an entire country like ours. I said to myself, If they’re such ludicrous people, then why are the Germans doing it for them?”
It’s interesting that Irving raises the same objection here to the caricature Hitler as Trevor-Roper does to the pawn and mountebank theories: Such a diminished figure can’t bridge the abyss between Hitler’s apparent petty-criminal character and the unimaginable magnitude of the crimes he did perpetrate, the power of the spell he cast over the German people.
“And so,” Irving continues, “I began to be skeptical, and emerging from university rather footloose and feckless with no particular aim, I became a steelworker in Germany. To help me learn the language. Then finding out about Dresden, which at that time was totally unknown in the outside world. Nobody had ever heard of the Dresden air raid,” he says, exaggerating somewhat. “And I wrote a book on the Dresden air raid [The Destruction of Dresden] which imported Dresden into the vocabulary of war atrocities. People now speak about Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Dresden, and that’s thanks to me. So I decided to be a writer. And I went to my publisher and he said, ‘What are you going to write next?’ and I said, ‘I’ve decided to pick Adolf Hitler.’
“And he said, ‘Well, there have been lots of books about Hitler. How are you going to justify yours?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to tell it from the inside. The way I did with the Dresden book.’ You couldn’t get access to the air-ministry records of the Dresden raid, so I circumvented that by advertising in the newspapers in Germany and in Britain and America for people who had taken part on one end or another of the air raid. And I’ll do the same with Hitler. I’ll spend five years interviewing all the Hitler people.”
At this point Irving’s wife, Suzie, a young woman from Denmark, entered and asked if we’d like tea or coffee. After we made our requests, Irving returned to the story of how he got entrée to the Magic Circle. In return for collecting documents for the archivist of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, Dr. Anton Hoch, Hoch “gave me a lot of help identifying to me the important people and all the addresses of Hitler’s private staff, who at that time kept their heads very, very low. They kept down. They were a small circle of very frightened people who were putting up with grave indignities and who had a very tough time. Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, had been held in prison by the Americans for three or four years, and that’s a very unpleasant experience for a young girl.”
It’s remarkable how easily Irving’s sympathies are aroused for a young woman who spends three or four years in an American prison, and yet he can appear so unmoved by the hundreds of thousands of young women who died in concentration camps. But Christa Schroeder was the key to the Magic Circle.
He pursued Christa Schroeder like a suitor. “Even with her, it took me a couple of years to get through her front door. It took a lot of patience. But the entrée to the circle, the Hitler circle, was when I translated the memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who was the head of the German high command and hanged at Nuremberg.”
He tracked down the field marshal’s son and asked him about ellipses and omissions in the published versions of his memoirs. “And he obviously valued the fact that I had taken this trouble to do that, because he was indignant at what the German publishers had done to this book. And because I’d taken that trouble, on the second occasion I visited him, in about 1967, he said, ‘If you like, I will introduce you to Otto Günsche.’ Still alive. The only one of Hitler’s adjutants still alive, living near Cologne. His significance was that he was the SS adjutant on Hitler’s staff who burned his body at the end. That’s where he comes in. He was Hitler’s most faithful bulldog. And he has never spoken to anybody except me. I got ten hours of recordings of Günsche, which he’s never given to anybody else.”
With Günsche, Irving was at last home free: “That was the entrance to the Magic Circle. It was a magic circle. They met at the graveside. When one of them left”—his curiously euphemistic word for dying—“they would meet at the graveside. And to get into that magic circle was almost impossible.”
Irving lost no time exploiting his entrée: “Having got into the ring, the next problem is winning their confidence. They had stories to tell, and a lot of them had private papers. This wasn’t so easy but . . . half the battle was won because I was the Englishman who had written the book on the Dresden air raids that was, by this time, a big bestseller in Germany.” While it’s undoubtedly true that part of the success of the Dresden book was attributable to the way it helped buttress a moral-equivalence slaughter-on-both-sides complacency in postwar Germany, I was surprised to discover that Irving didn’t encourage this view at the time he wrote his Dresden book. In fact, in the last sentence of the book Irving calls Dresden “a massacre carried out in the cause of bringing to their knees a people who, corrupted by Nazism, had committed the greatest crimes against humanity in recorded time.”
But the more time Irving spent with the Magic Circle, the less he seemed to focus on these “greatest crimes in recorded time,” the more he seemed to succumb to the spell. Irving describes himself as laboring to gain the confidence of the Magic Circle, but another kind of confidence game seemed to be at work—one in which Irving was, if not conned, then taken so far inside their confidence, so far inside the Magic Circle, that he could no longer look at it from without. Within the charmed circle, the Hitler spell still held sway, and Irving had fallen victim to it.
“I was talking to these people in ’67, ’68, and ’69. I carried out major interviews with all these people on tape. I went into enormous detail with them. And what struck me very early on . . . is that you’re dealing with people who are educated people. [Hitler] had attracted a garniture of high-level educated people around him. The secretaries were top-flight secretaries. The adjutants were people who had gone through university or through staff college and had risen through their own abilities to the upper levels of the military service. So they were educated people with insight.”
I recall wondering at the time where this praise of the Magic Circle’s résumés was leading. I didn’t have long to wait: “This is the point. These people, without exception, spoke well of him. Coming as I did with an as-yet-unpainted canvas, this was really the seminal point, the seminal experience—to find twenty-five people of education, all of whom privately spoke well of him. Once they’d won your confidence and they knew that you weren’t going to go and report them to the state prosecutor, they trusted you. And they thought, well, now at last they were doing their chief a service.”
I believe Freudian slips are often overrated as tools of analysis. Nonetheless, Irving’s slip here—“Once they’d won your confidence” when clearly in the context he means “once you’d won their confidence”—gives away the true nature of the confidence game going on. Irving’s reasoning is fairly suspect on several other counts. First, his claim that he approached his Magic Circle sources with “an as-yet-unpainted canvas” is unconvincing—unpainted, perhaps, but not uncolored by that time.
More important, his claim to have been thunderstruck that people with excellent résumés still spoke highly of Hitler should scarcely come as a revelation. (He also tells me without a trace of irony that they told him Hitler was well loved by children and dogs.) More important than their degree of education in shaping their postwar view is their degree of association with Hitler: It serves their own self-image far better if the Hitler they present to the world, the Hitler they served so faithfully, is the congenial gemütlich host of the post-midnight dinner parties rather than the mass murderer of millions. All that happened outside the bunker, outside the Magic Circle’s purview.
But Irving still maintains he was just absolutely astonished to find all this goodwill from the secretaries and flunkies: “That’s what convinced me that obviously there was a book to be written here. That there were two Adolf Hitlers. There was the Adolf Hitler of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. And there was the Adolf Hitler that these people had experienced in flesh and blood. That he was a walking, talking ordinary human being with bad breath and largely false teeth.”
What’s false here is not just Hitler’s teeth but the way Irving defines the two Hitlers: the true, flesh-and-blood, impressive-to-top-notch-secretaries Hitler, and the false Hitler “of Madison Avenue and Hollywood”—as if the flesh and blood of the fifty million casualties of Hitler’s war were an invention of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. A better description of the “other” Hitler would be not the Hollywood and Madison Avenue but the Dachau and Auschwitz Hitler. The bizarre logic of this attitude inheres in the allusion to Hilter’s “bad breath”—in the pretense that Irving is no slavish hero-worshiper but capable of seeing the unvarnished truth about Hilter’s flaws: not the mass murder, of course, but the poor oral hygiene.
Here again, the question arose: Can Irving believe in the false logic of the two-Hitler argument, has he convinced himself of it? Or is he a cynical manipulator—a mountebank? The Bullock-versus-Trevor-Roper debate again, here not about Hitler but about the thought-world of his chief postwar defender. It was at this point that Irving told me a Hitler story I’ll never forget, one that may go further to explain him—and perhaps Hitler—than any I’d heard. It’s a story he heard from the woman who was his key to the Magic Circle, Christa Schroeder, a story about Hitler washing blood off himself.
“I was talking with Christa Schroeder one morning about 2 or 3 A.M. over a bottle of wine, and she says, ‘You know, he [Hitler] could be quite cruel. I don’t think you’re right about Hitler’s Jewish problem. He could be very cruel.’ You sensed a story coming on. . . . Now, the problem with Christa Schroeder was I couldn’t take notes. If she saw a piece of paper come out she would clam right up. I had to go straight round to a café and download my brain onto a sheet of paper for hours. You can discipline yourself to do that,” Irving tells me.
“And she said, ‘Well, you remember the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934? I was in Berlin, and the chief’—which she called him or ‘A.H.’—’phoned me and said I had to go to the Rhineland immediately to join him—something had come up. And I flew over to the Rhineland and Dr. Goebbels was there. On our way to the chief, we flew down to Munich that same night, and we drove out in his car up to Bad Weisee, and I was with him when he arrested Ernst Roehm and all the SA leaders. And I was with him when he drove back, and I remember how—how impressed I was that on the way back, he personally got out of this big supercharger and stopped the oncoming cars of the other SA generals and had them arrested, too, and no concern with the risk that he was taking. . . .
“‘Anyway, at the end of all this bloody day, when they were going to take them up to prison to be shot, we flew back to Berlin and I’d lost sight of [Hitler] in the Chancellory for a while. And I went to the cafeteria and I got myself . . . you know it was quite late . . . but he joined me because we were both vegetarians. He came in an hour later, stood in the doorway and he says, “So Fräulein Schroeder, now I have had a bath and I am as clean as a newborn babe again.”‘”
“‘Clean as a newborn babe’—meaning from the blood?” I asked Irving.
“That’s right. It jangled around her brain for forty years until she found an Englishman she could repeat it to.”
“And why did she find that particularly cruel?”
“She found it symptomatic of the facility with which he committed mass murder,” Irving says matter-of-factly. “That he just had to have a bath and was as clean as a newborn baby.”
“He leaves it behind in—”
“Went down the plughole,” Irving assents enthusiastically, “like the blood in Psycho.”
This is an astonishing story, but one I’m inclined to credit despite its source because it certainly does Hitler no credit. I’m not quite sure what Irving makes of this story, but I think it can be seen as a defining Hitler story—and a defining David Irving story. A defining Hitler story because it’s an image of Hitler in effect brandishing his own baby picture, pronouncing himself “clean as a newborn babe” and just as innocent in an utterly meretricious—almost knowingly meretricious—way: enjoying, laughing at the notion of himself as an innocent babe. Brandishing his baby picture to forge a counterfeit image of innocence, as the blood, the first trickle of oceans to come, spirals “down the plughole like the blood in Psycho.”
And it’s a defining David Irving story because he’s made it his mission to wash the blood off Hitler’s image, to restore him to history as a (relative) innocent, certainly one innocent of the blood of genocide.
Irving doesn’t use the image of washing blood off and newborn babes, but he does use the rhetoric of cleansing—“stone cleaning,” he calls it. One can trace his evolution from respected amateur historian to sporadic Holocaust denier in the way he redefines “stone cleaning” from erasing grime to erasing crime. The “stone cleaning” image came up when I asked Irving if his sympathetic attitude toward Hitler might be a reflection of his captivation, if not captivity, by the Magic Circle. “Is it possible there’s a kind of ‘Stockholm syndrome’ going on?” I asked him.
He professed himself unfamiliar with the phrase; I explained its origin in the report of a Swedish bank robbery that turned into a prolonged siege after which hostages held by the robbers emerged from captivity speaking remarkably sympathetically of their captors.
“In the same way, did they [the Magic Circle] gain your sympathy and—”
“Oh, undoubtedly,” he said without hesitation. “Every time I’ve written a biography, you find you become close to the character you’re writing about because you’re his ambassador then. You’re his ambassador to the afterlife. Or to the next generation. And if you do your job conscientiously, then you bend over backward to do it.” After a pause, he adds, “I don’t think it should lead you to adapt an unobjective position,” although it’s hard to see how being Adolf Hitler’s self-anointed Ambassador to the Afterlife conduces to objectivity. “I think that people who say I’m whitewashing Hitler,” he continues, “or that I’m a Hitler apologist—these words I find deeply offensive. I’m stone cleaning, not whitewashing.”
“Stone cleaning?”
“Cleaning dirt off.” It’s an English expression which, he says, came into use after the limitations on sulphurous coal burning cleaned up London’s grime-affixing smog: “The buildings are being cleansed of sulfuric grime,” he tells me. Similarly, with Hitler, he says, “There’s been a lot of slime poured over him, both during and after the war.”
For Irving, however, stone cleaning has meant far more than that. The turning point in the evolution of his views on the question of gas chambers and the extermination came in 1988, he tells me. Until then, he’d always adhered to the line that Hitler hadn’t ordered extermination by gas. Then he came to question whether there had been any extermination or gassing at all. The occasion was the 1988 trial of Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Irving had come to testify there had been no Führer order. But “I was shown the reports on the tests on the walls of the gas chambers at Auschwitz”—these were tests performed forty-five years after the fact by America’s self-proclaimed electric-chair expert Fred Leuchter, an engineer rather than a chemist—“and I became quite satisfied having studied forensic chemistry at university that this is an exact science and that there’s no traces of cyanide compounds in the walls of those gas chambers.” That was enough to convince him: “That was the turning point for me. That’s when we decided we had to cut the word ‘gas chamber’ out of my book.”
Irving says he doesn’t “regard myself as a Revisionist because I’m not a Holocaust specialist.” But he seems happy to take credit for the recent high visibility of Revisionism, arguing that his claim in Hitler’s War that an absence of a written Führer order for extermination became the basis for a Revisionist view which denied that the killing process ever happened.
“So what started out as a historical footnote in my Hitler’s War in 1977 has now become so important that prime ministers and presidents have to [denounce] it,” he says proudly. He’s proud, but surprisingly he’s also somewhat ashamed, ashamed at least of some of the company he keeps in the Revisionist camp.
“Let me ask you about that,” I said. “You know historians often speak of you as someone who’s dug up a remarkable number of important documents, speak of that with great respect, but—”
“Then they say, ‘Pity he flipped’?” he asked me almost plaintively.
“Well, they probably do say that in one way or another, but aren’t you uncomfortable with the kind of people who are drawn to support you, many of whom are not interested in evaluating this objectively but are flat-out anti-Semites who would—”
“Yes—” he began, as our voices overlapped.
“—would, if there was no Final Solution, have wanted one anyway?”
To my astonishment, he said, “You’re absolutely right. The word ‘uncomfortable’ I think is an understatement. I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites.”
He then proceeds to make another amazing assertion: He’s only using these “cracked anti-Semites” cynically. He plans to jettison them as soon as he can find more respectable forums.
“What else can I do?” he said, but speak at the gatherings of these “cracked anti-Semites” for the moment. “If I’ve been denied a platform worldwide, where else can I make my voice heard? As soon as I get back onto regular debating platforms I shall shake off this ill-fitting shoe which I’m standing on at present. I’m not blind. I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm, because I get associated then with those stupid actions.”
Fascinating: association with cracked anti-Semites experienced by Irving as the minor discomfort of ill-fitting footwear. Fascinating as well his candor about the manipulation he claims to be practicing upon the cracked anti-Semite allies he plans to discard like an ill-fitting shoe. He’ll use them, these vile true believers, use them, manipulate them to give him a platform for his views and then when he—it’s not clear how—becomes respectable again, he’ll drop them. Why did this somehow remind me of a certain historical figure proclaiming himself “clean as a newborn babe again”? Perhaps it’s the assumption that the taint of whipping up the cracked anti-Semites will all wash off, presumably just like the blood spiraling “down the plughole” in Psycho.
I must admit I found Irving’s reasoning difficult to take seriously; it didn’t make sense either as cynical, calculating opportunism (it seemed too pitifully transparent and inept to succeed) or as genuine, heartfelt rationalization of his behavior. I could not even find a Bullock-like synthesis of calculation and sincerity to make this argument seem coherent, especially (or because) he was confiding it to one of the “traditional enemy.” (“Traditional enemy” is Irving’s name for Jews in his Action Report newsletters, which seem to cater to his “temporary” cracked anti-Semite allies and Holocaust deniers. Therein one can find reports from enthusiastic home-experimenter Holocaust-deniers on their “scientific” experiments in which, for instance, they subject chickens and rabbits to diesel-exhaust gas in an attempt to disprove the possibility that such gases were used to kill Jews.)
Similarly, Irving’s stance in relation to Holocaust denial has seemed to waver confusingly back and forth in the time since I encountered him in his supposed moment-of-truth deliberation over the Eichmann Führer-order revelation. In his controversial 1996 biography of Goebbels, which he was hard at work on when I spoke to him, Irving seems to argue that the Holocaust, or at least mass killings of Jews, did happen, but that it was the evil Goebbels who was more responsible than Hitler, still virtually innocent “as a newborn babe” of that blood. Or at least of deliberate killing, of premeditation.
That was the position he maintained when he spoke to me: 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. And as for the concentration camps, they were really there for concentration, not killing. It’s a position he seems to hold in the somewhat schizoid biography of Goebbels: There was a systematic effort to eliminate Jews, but Auschwitz was not a place specifically designed to gas and kill, merely “the most brutal of all Himmler’s slave labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate”(!).
“What happened in the camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka,” he told me, “was not murder except in the kind of generic sense that people were sent to camps where it was likely they would die” of starvation and disease.
“Generic murder” might qualify as one of the great evasive euphemisms of the late twentieth century. Irving makes it sound somehow less culpable than real murder, although its victims are just as dead. “There was a climate of hatred,” he concedes, against Jews. “There was an atmosphere of brutality and mass murder” on the eastern front, an “atmosphere” whose origin he prefers to attribute to Allied bombing raids on the German homeland. As a result of the “atmosphere,” there might have been a hundred thousand or so Jews killed there in spontaneous outbreaks by troops on the eastern front.
“You wouldn’t apply the word ‘criminal’ to even one hundred thousand, or ‘evil’—”
“Unquestionably a criminal action,” he said. “But the criminal action, to my mind, wasn’t genocide.”
He finds an even more peculiar rationale for distinguishing the murder of Jews, even hundreds of thousands, from actual genocide. “To my mind, the crime wasn’t killing Jews. The crime was killing innocent Jews. And it was the innocence that made it a crime rather than their Jewishness that made it a crime. But this is what the word ‘genocide’ is meant to blanket out. Because as soon as you abandon the word ‘genocide’ and call it ‘innocenticide’ instead, the Jewish community would oppose that.”
I must admit with the introduction of the “innocenticide” concept, I lost the ability to fathom what Irving was talking about.
I tried to get past the semantics of “generic murder” and “innocenticide”: “Setting aside the name genocide—” I began.
“The criminality is beyond doubt,” he concedes. “These are innocent people being killed. And I even take it one step further than a lot of people [presumably he means a lot of people in the Revisionist camps or a lot of his crackpot anti-Semite followers]: If somebody’s put in a camp where they’re likely to die of typhus, this, too, is a crime, even though what happened to people who died isn’t prima facie murder. Anne Frank died of typhus. She wasn’t murdered. But it’s still a crime. And if I’m writing a book about Adolf Hitler, I still have to absolve him of that particular crime. Because it wasn’t—what’s the word?—premeditated. Any more than the killing of all the people who died of starvation in Buchenwald wasn’t premeditated at the end of the war. Emaciated corpses that television loves to show us. This wasn’t premeditated. Hitler didn’t go around saying, ‘Okay, let’s emaciate these guys.’”
But didn’t how “these guys” got there to die in the first place have something to do with Adolf Hitler? I found myself fascinated by the kind of hair-splitting Irving indulged in, always with the aim of cleansing the blood from Hitler. It was somehow important to absolve Hitler of the charge of murder in Anne Frank’s death from typhus, even though if typhus hadn’t gotten her, one of Hitler’s crematoriums would have. It was, ultimately, horrifying: It was like watching the Hitler spell in action as Irving tied himself in knots making a magic circle around the absent figure of the perpetrator, the Hitler he wants to envision “clean as a newborn babe.”
I tried one final time. I quoted Irving’s own words to him from something he’d written in the introduction to Hitler’s War: “If this biography were simply a history of the rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich, it would be legitimate to conclude: ‘Hitler killed the Jews.’ He after all created the atmosphere of hatred with his speeches, [which] even though never explicit, left the clear impression that ‘liquidate’ was what he meant.”
“Exactly what I said to you today,” Irving told me.
“But is there a practical difference between creating the atmosphere for extermination . . . and leaving the ‘clear impression’ he wanted liquidation?”
“Oh, I think a court can find the difference,” he said cheerfully.
“A moral difference though?”
“It would be rather like killing somebody by negligence,” he said. “Hitler was negligent in not realizing that this would be the outcome of his speeches. That would be one way of looking at it.”
Holocaust by negligence; extermination as unintended consequence.
A big “oops!” by the newborn babe.