Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  CORNFLAKES AND APPLIANCES

  Not that I had any time to reflect on Judge Gray’s attitude. Irving reentered the witness box and Rampton continued his questioning. He began with the World War II Bletchley Park intercepts Irving had submitted as evidence. Bletchley Park, fifty miles north of London, was the site of Ultra, the top-secret decryption project that broke Germany’s Enigma codes. Among the decrypts were reports from units on the Eastern Front describing the massacres of Jews. In August 1941, one general boasted that thirty thousand Jews had already been murdered in his region. Based on these types of communiqués, British intelligence experts had concluded by September 1941 that there was “evidence of a policy of savage intimidation if not of ultimate extermination.” Churchill, facing the ultimate Hobson’s choice, said nothing publicly—despite the fact that it would have alerted some of the victims to their fate—because it would have also tipped off the Germans that the British had broken their code.

  One of the decrypts Irving had submitted described how, in November 1941, 940 Berlin Jews had been dispatched to Riga on a train equipped with 3,000 kilos of bread, 200 kilos of peas, 300 kilos of cornflakes, 47,200 Reichsmark, flour, nutriments, soup powder, and spices. A few days later another intercept reported that a trainload of German Jews from Bremen had also been dispatched to Riga with “Geräte” (“appliances”), which Irving translated as tools of their trade. These decrypts proved, Irving argued, that Jews were being resettled equipped with food to satisfy their immediate needs, tools of their trade, and a substantial supply of cash. They constituted a “dent in the image” of the Holocaust and countered the perception of “wretched victims . . . stuffed into trains, with no food and water for three or four days, and shipped across Europe to their deaths.”

  Rampton asked Irving what proof he had that the supplies were intended for these Jews. Irving shrugged his shoulders and calmly said, “None whatsoever,” and then added that it “would be perverse to assume that it was not.” I contrasted Irving’s conviction that the supplies on the train proved that Jews were being resettled, with his insistence that only a Hitler-signed document would prove that the German leader ordered the Holocaust. Rampton reacted similarly, declaring Irving ready to “leap to conclusions in favor of the SS and the Nazis on every single occasion.” These intercepts, Rampton continued, rather than constitute a “dent in Holocaust perception,” simply indicated that the trains had food and cash, some of which may have been for these Jews, prior to their being shot. Then, to prove his point, Rampton showed Irving a communiqué reporting that, on November 25, 1941, eight days after the cornflakes-laden train left Germany, 2,934 Jews from Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt had been executed at Kovno. “Is it likely that that is where your train load of 944 well provisioned Jews wound up?” Irving conceded, “It is not impossible.”3

  Irving’s next answer surprised me. Rampton had asked how many Jews were shot on the Eastern Front. Irving responded, “At least half million and probably as many as one and a half million.” His previous estimates had been, at most, hundreds or thousands. I passed Anthony a note: “Why is he conceding such a high death rate?” Anthony wrote back: “I think that he is playing (as he sees it) a tactical game of retreat and advance, in order to continue his practice of appealing to multiple audiences—to deny a bit for the deniers, and to admit a bit for the court and the (rest of) the civilized world. But don’t worry this game is bound to fall apart as the trial unfolds, because under cross-examination it is impossible to maintain alternative positions.”

  Rampton must have seen Irving’s tactics similarly. He insisted that Irving affirm that the Jews to whom he referred had been “disposed of by shooting.” Though Rampton did not say so, I knew he wanted to prevent Irving from subsequently attributing their deaths to war-related privations. Irving gave a qualified answer. They were shot, but not on orders from Berlin. Berlin “put the Jews and the other victims on the trains and sent them to the East with the food and equipment to start a new life. Once they arrived the system broke down and the murderers stepped in.”4

  Rampton, noting that reports on the killing of vast numbers of Jews were transmitted to Heydrich, Himmler’s second-in-command, asked Irving if these messages weren’t “evidence of some kind of system operating at the behest . . . of the authorities in Berlin”? Judge Gray echoed Rampton’s query: “Berlin must have known that the shootings were continuing on, as you [Irving] would accept, a massive scale. To that extent would you accept it is systematic?” (emphasis added). Though I firmly believed history should not be adjudicated in the courtroom, I was beginning to sense that, when dealing with a man like Irving, the courtroom offered certain advantages. Here, when the judge or opposing counsel asked a question, evasiveness and imprecise answers would not suffice.

  After some hemming and hawing, Irving conceded that these killings were systematic. But before I could even absorb the implications of this concession, Irving qualified his answer. They were like Vietnam’s Mi Lai, where American soldiers massacred civilians. In war, Irving contended, these things happen. “They are subsequently covered up by the people in charge.” As a baby boomer and sixties protestor, I remembered Mi Lai well. In fact, I had met one of the American helicopter pilots who had tried to stop the massacre. I knew, therefore, that Mi Lai was an entirely different matter. While the American soldiers hid their offense, the Germans left a paper trail. There was a consistent flow of information from the Eastern Front, including an Einsatzgruppen report that listed: “Executions carried out 137,346,” of whom 98 percent were Jews. “Do not these things jump out at you, Mr Irving?” Instead of answering, Irving brushed Rampton’s query aside. “This is of great interest to a Holocaust historian, but not to an Hitler historian.”5

  Rampton ignored his comment and continued to present Irving with evidence that the murder of the Jews on the Eastern Front was well known to the highest authorities in Berlin. In early 1942, the head of the SS in Minsk told civilian officials that a “complete liquidation of the Jews” was not currently possible “because the ground is too frozen to dig pits . . . [for] mass graves.” Nor, the official continued, could a “complete eradication of the Jews” occur now “because workers were still needed from among the[m].”6 Once again, Irving belittled the significance of the evidence, describing it as a “poor substitute for the real thing”—hard evidence that Hitler had ordered it. Irving’s refusal to consider the historical evidence in these documents gave Rampton the opportunity to refocus the court’s attention on our central argument: “What is your task as a historian, Mr Irving? . . . Is it not to give an objective, fair, interpretation to the cumulative effect of all the evidence? You will not draw the obvious conclusions from the evidence before you, simply because you have not got a piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler saying, ‘Do it.’”7 For Irving cornflakes on a train meant Jews were to be happily resettled and a message from Himmler to Heydrich not to shoot one trainload of Berlin Jews constituted incontrovertible evidence that Hitler gave the order to stop the killings.

  Rampton became more insistent: “[Was] what the SS were doing in the East . . . to a total of perhaps 1.5 million [Jews] . . . done on the authority of and with the knowledge of at least Heydrich in Berlin?” Irving responded most matter-of-factly: “Yes, quite clearly.” Rampton looked relieved: “At long last I have a concession that Heydrich authorized and knew about shootings of these hundreds of thousand of Jews in the East.” Irving protested that it was not a concession because he had said this “all along.”8

  Rampton asked Irving to examine a copy of Himmler’s diary entry from December 18, 1941. Irving protested that the document was irrelevant because he did not have access to it when he was writing his books. Judge Gray acknowledged that there was “a lot of force” to Irving’s argument, but added a caveat. If the defense introduced a document with which Irving was unfamiliar, but which pointed unequivocally in a particular direction and Irving denied that it did, we could then argue that Irving was not obje
ctive when shown a new document.9 Judge Gray’s ruling illustrated that Irving faced a problem of his own making. If he rejected documents that unequivocally proved him wrong, he would prove me correct, namely that he discounted evidence that disputed his preexisting conclusions. If he accepted these documents, he would have to admit he was wrong about the Holocaust. I was beginning to see how the strategy Anthony had laid out for me years earlier was playing itself out. The historical evidence would box Irving in between his lies and the truth. Though this moment passed without fanfare, it was of significant tactical importance.

  On December 18, 1941, Himmler recorded the topics he discussed with Hitler. Next to “Judenfrage” (Jewish Question), he entered Hitler’s response: “To be exterminated as partisans.” Rampton next read from the December 1942 Einsatzgruppen Report No. 51, which listed 363,000 Jews killed. He contextualized the two documents. In December 1941, Hitler said liquidate the Jews. “Then, low [sic] and behold . . . just over a year later, comes along a report from the East saying that just that has happened.” Irving quietly answered, “Yes.” Rampton continued, “The probability that Hitler saw that report and was, therefore, what shall we say, implicated in the murder of all those 363,000 Eastern Jewish is confirmed, is it not?” Irving agreed. “Yes, there is no contention between us on that point.”

  I was about to turn to James and happily proclaim another concession, when Irving qualified his answer. Hitler had ordered the Jews killed, but “as part of the partisan combating.” Rampton was prepared for Irving’s maneuver. Report No. 51 included the information that, in addition to the 363,000 Jews who were killed, 14,000 “partisan accomplices” had been killed. If Jews were partisans why were the two listed separately? Rampton answered his own question. “This is put coldly and bluntly, a record of the number of Jews deliberately executed for the reason that they are Jews.” Irving quietly acknowledged that this was a “reasonable supposition.”10

  Rampton contrasted Irving’s answer in the courtroom with a statement he had made at a 1986 Australian press conference. He had declared that the Jews were the victims of a large number of “rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements which exist in Central Europe.” These criminals “acted on their own impulse, their own initiative.”11 Irving insisted that there was no contradiction between his concessions in court and his statements in Australia. Apparently caught off guard by Irving’s claims, Rampton could only manage a “What?” Irving argued that these documents proved that the “mindless criminals on the Eastern front who carried out these killing operations had a motive of their own to do the killing even when they were ordered by Berlin or by Hitler’s headquarters to stop.” Judge Gray interjected, “That . . . is not really the point is it?” Irving apologized. “Oh, I am sorry. I must have missed the point that Mr Rampton is asking about.” The judge instructed Irving, “Just focus on the question. What is being put is that what you said in 1986 about these men on the Eastern front having acted on their own impulse is at any rate now known by you not to be right, because in fact it was authorized at the highest level, namely by Hitler?” Entrapped by the very chain of documents that he claimed exonerated Hitler, Irving conceded, “Certainly Hitler sanctioned the killing of the Jews on the Eastern front . . . the non-German Jews, and that has never been a matter of contention for me.” His earlier statments, were, he said, attempts “to explain the mentality of the people who are [sic] doing the killing on the Eastern Front.”

  As the clock moved toward the lunch adjournment, Rampton was intent on preventing Irving from retreating from his concession about Hitler’s approval of the killings on the Eastern Front. “My suggestion is this, that those words you used in Australia . . . suggest[ed] to the audience that this killing of the Eastern Jews on a vast scale went on without the knowledge or approval of Hitler and his cronies.” I sighed with relief when Irving responded, “If that impression is given, it is the wrong impression.”12 There were no retreats and we went to lunch.

  As we sat in the subterranean conference room in Rampton’s chambers munching crustless white bread egg salad and smoked salmon sandwiches, the researchers were almost giddy with excitement. They reviewed every aspect of Irving’s various concessions, as well as his attempts to deny that they were concessions. Years of their work were paying off. In contrast, Rampton was very quiet. I watched him nurse a glass of French Burgundy. As lunch was ending, I told him that on the previous evening the paralegals had taken me out for dinner and that, while we walked back to the underground, Laura Tyler said something that deeply touched me. “Working on this case makes me feel as if—at a very young age and the very start of my legal career—I’m making a difference. The problem is that, after this, commercial cases will feel so petty.” Rampton looked at me quizzically. I feared he thought Laura unprofessional for failing to grasp that a life in the law meant mundane cases, occasionally punctuated by more interesting ones. Instead he said, “But Deborah, that’s true for all of us.” He sounded a bit hurt that I needed to be told that.

  When we resumed deliberations, Irving told Judge Gray that his Australian remarks that the shootings were conducted by rogue officers had been made fourteen years earlier, suggesting, it was not fair to hold him to these views. As soon as Irving made this point, Heather—who had an uncanny ability to put her hands on the precise document at precisely the right time—handed Rampton a piece of paper. When she saw me watching, she passed me a copy. The paper contained two statements by Irving. In a 1992 letter to the head of the IHR, the California-based denial institute, he wrote: “My position remains unchanged, that there were certain Mi Lai–type atrocities by troops in Russia, that the gas chambers and factories of death are Hollywood legends.” The second excerpt came from his 1992 presentation to the IHR conference: “We have to accept there were Mi Lai–type massacres, where SS officers . . . machine gun[ned] hundreds if not thousands of Jews.” This was precisely in line with what he had said fourteen years earlier in Australia. When Rampton finished reading these statements, Irving declared, “I am accused of being consistent, am I?” Rampton grabbed the linguistic opportunity. “Yes, you are. You are accused of consistently and knowingly reducing the extent of the responsibility for these massacres. . . . The words ‘Mi Lai–type massacres,’ mean . . . these massacres were done by criminal gangers [sic] unauthorized in the East without the approval, consent or knowledge of the people in Berlin.” Irving, all traces of bravado gone from his voice, conceded, “That is correct.”

  Rampton admonished Irving that, had he bothered to do the research done by other historians, he could have known it was wrong before he said it. Irving, sounding a bit forlorn, protested, “I am not a Holocaust historian.” “Then why,” Rampton demanded, “are you making a categorical assertion that they were simply unauthorized gangster killings?”13 Irving insisted he had only been answering a question from the audience. Irving was still responding when Rampton began to shuffle through his papers. Ostensibly, he was looking for a document. I suspected, however, that he was trying to convey how little credence he accorded these explanations.

  RAMSHACKLE AND HAPHAZARD KILLING OPERATIONS

  For years Irving’s mantra had been that the absence of a document, because no document exists in which Hitler explicitly says “we are liquidating them,” proves that Hitler did not know about the liquidations. Now Rampton reminded Irving that Report 51 with its 363,000 death toll had the notation: “Presented to Hitler.” Irving conceded that Hitler might have looked at it, but, if he did, he saw it only as a “footnote,” something inconsequential. Judge Gray looked startled. “It is quite a simple document, and it is referring to the killing by shooting of 300,000 Jews. Well, you have to be quite a man to just pass over that . . . ?” Irving told Judge Gray that Hitler had bigger things on his plate. He was primarily concerned with his army’s woes at Stalingrad. Judge Gray seemed unpersuaded: “He is not going to notice a document telling him 300,000 . . . innocent civilians were being shot by his army?”14

 
; On the next day Rampton reminded Irving of a letter he had written in 1989 to West German historian Rainer Zitelmann, in which he contended that no serious historian can now believe that Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were factories of death, “all the experts in scientific forensic evidence is to the contrary.” Rampton accused Irving of having no evidence to “contradict the probability” that these camps were extermination facilities. Irving quietly concurred: “I have no evidence to contradict the probability.” Judge Gray interrupted to ask Irving, “Does that mean that you now resile from the view you expressed in your letter?” This question produced an exchange that made my head swim.

  IRVING: No, my Lord. I am just confirming the way he put the statement. I have no evidence to contradict his statement because I have no evidence, period.

  RAMPTON: Then will you accept it is a probability then?

  IRVING: No. That is a different thing entirely. I do not want to sound as though I am a bit of an eel on this but . . . I do not want to sound slippery; I just do not want to be nailed down in one corner where later on you will hold it up dripping and slithering next day and say, “Look what you said yesterday.”

  JUSTICE GRAY: But, you see, you said to Dr Zitelmann that it was clear to you that no serious historian can now believe that Treblinka and some other camps were [death factories].