Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  This was not a typical British queue. Three and four people vied for a single seat and rushed to it as soon as the doors opened. Rampton arrived around 10:20. The crowd would barely give an inch. Adopting his most curmudgeonly style—something he did well—Rampton would push his way through, muttering all the while. An ardent rugby fan, Rampton dubbed the crowd the “scrum,” after the tight formation players use to protect the ball carrier. As people waited, strange configurations developed. One morning a young man in a “White Power” T-shirt stood next to a survivor. The survivor had taken off his jacket. I wasn’t sure if he did so because of the heat in the crowded hallway or to ensure that his tattooed number was visible. As I walked by, someone gestured toward them and whispered, “Auschwitz tattoo trumps T-shirt. Correct?”

  I had gotten used to seeing a beautifully coiffed, smartly dressed woman of about forty every morning in the queue. During the previous week she had sat right behind Irving, chatting with him during the breaks. When one of my friends, who had just arrived, asked for an update, the woman enthusiastically complied: “Oh, Irving’s beating them on everything. He’s doing great.” When I heard what had happened, I dubbed this mysterious woman “Brunhilda.”

  I soon forgot about her when Irving rose to introduce a newspaper article about a lawsuit a Holocaust survivor had brought against an insurance company. According to the article the insurance company settled the suit because it feared the “jury will be sympathetic to a man who has survived a Nazi concentration camp.” Irving asserted that this was the argument he had been making in his “rather heated remarks” about Jewish “fraudsters and racketeer[s] in the United States.” Judge Gray told Irving he did not think the insurance company’s decision and Irving’s remarks were equivalent. The insurance company was concerned about a jury’s sympathy with the victims, while Irving, Judge Gray observed, had contended that Jews who get into legal trouble “use the Holocaust as a kind of shield against their own criminality.” Irving insisted that both instances dealt with the special “insulation” survivors enjoy. With that he turned his back to Judge Gray, faced the gallery, and added a postscript: “We all have the utmost sympathy with victims of the Holocaust and that includes myself, and I want to say that here.”1 The man with the tattoo on his arm glared.

  Rampton then announced that Robert Jan van Pelt would begin testifying the following day. Since Robert Jan was scheduled to attend a Holocaust conference in Stockholm later in the week, Rampton suggested that court adjourn on that day and reconvene on Friday, when we did not usually meet, to accommodate Robert Jan’s schedule. Irving amicably agreed.

  FABRICATING EVIDENCE AND FUMIGATING CADAVERS

  With preliminaries completed, Rampton turned to Irving’s 1989 press conference launching the British edition of Leuchter’s report. A reporter had asked Irving whether he thought evidence used at Nuremberg had been fabricated. Irving had replied, “Oh, we fabricated a lot of evidence” and then illustrated his point by telling the story of the Nuremberg testimony of Marie Vaillant-Couturier, a French-Catholic resistance fighter who was interned in Birkenau. She described for the international tribunal how camp inmates died from thirst, starvation, beatings, insufficient clothing, illness, and gassings.2 According to her, inmates who were punished received fifty blows with a stick. The beating was administered by a swinging apparatus manipulated by an SS man.

  Vaillant-Couturier testified that, when SS officers needed a servant, they would accompany the woman commandant of the camp to the women’s camp to choose an inmate. They made their choices when prisoners were being disinfected because then the women were naked. She also testified that one of the camp barracks was used as a brothel for the SS. Prisoners who had been in other camps had reported to her that the same brothel system existed in their camps.

  Irving had told reporters at his press conference that the American judge on the Nuremberg Tribunal, Francis Biddle, was so appalled by her testimony that he wrote in his private diary: “I don’t believe a word of what she is saying. I think she is a bloody liar.” But, Irving asserted, Judge Biddle kept these sentiments to himself and, therefore, her testimony entered the official record unscathed.

  Rampton asked if Judge Biddle had actually called her a “bloody liar.” Irving admitted this was his “gloss,” but insisted it was a legitimate gloss because Judge Biddle was “fed up” with this woman’s “implausible” testimony. Rampton took out a copy of the relevant pages of Biddle’s diary. After summarizing the various punishments Vaillant-Couturier had described, the American judge started a new paragraph. He summarized her description of the brothel and her claim that “all the other camps used the same system.” Biddle then wrote: “(This I doubt.)”

  Rampton put down the page, looked up at Irving, and accused him of having taken a “side note”—Biddle’s reference to her comments about brothels at other camps—and inflated it into “general doubt” about her entire testimony. Irving insisted that Biddle was rejecting her entire testimony, not one small aspect of it. Then he turned to Judge Gray and said he was willing to “concede, for what it is worth,” that his comments about Biddle’s doubts came “four or five . . . or possibly even ten years” after he examined the judge’s diary in the Collection of Nuremberg Trial Documents at Syracuse University in New York State.

  For the first time since the trial began, I thought Irving had made a good point. If so much time had passed between his visit to the archive and his press conference, then his failure to recall precisely what the judge wrote was understandable. But then I heard a commotion behind me. Heather was excitedly whispering in Rampton’s ear as she hurriedly ruffled through her files. She pulled out a document, circled something on it, and handed it to Rampton. He studied it for a moment and then, somewhat offhandedly, resumed his cross-examination: “Tell me when you went to Syracuse?” Irving offered to check the precise date. Rampton, all traces of offhandedness suddenly gone from his voice, suggested he not bother. Gesturing to the document Heather had handed him, Rampton noted that in December 1999, shortly before the start of the trial, Irving had responded to our Statement of Case. In it he had written: “I originally read Judge Biddle’s papers . . . in 1988.”3 I suppressed a smile. Irving had—yet again—entrapped himself. The press conference at which he said Biddle called Couturier a “bloody liar” was in 1989. In other words, in contrast to the testimony he had just given, there had not been “four or five . . . even ten years” between his examination of Biddle’s diary and the press conference. There had been one year. I wondered if Irving had forgotten what he wrote or, so accustomed to having his distortions go unchallenged, reflexively assumed he could get away with this.

  But Rampton wasn’t quite finished. In his diary, Irving recorded how, after his 1988 visit to the Biddle archives, he drove directly to Toronto to give a speech. We had the text of that speech. Irving had told his audience that Biddle had written “All this I doubt.” Irving’s first distortion occurred but a few days, not years—as he had just claimed—after reading Biddle’s diary.

  Irving, no longer able to claim that his distortions were a result of the lapse of years, now insisted that his addition of “All” was not a distortion because Biddle was clearly referring to all of Vaillant-Couturier’s testimony. Judge Gray—who generally waited for Rampton to finish before asking his questions—intervened: “Yes, but he did not say that.” After telling Judge Gray that he added the word “All” to make Biddle’s comment more literate for an audience, Irving shrugged his very large shoulders and added, “Frankly, I do not think there is very much mileage to be made out of that.”4 Judge Gray said nothing.

  Turning to the Leuchter Report, Rampton observed that Leuchter’s fundamental mistake—the assumption that it took far more poison gas to kill humans than to kill vermin, when, in fact, the reverse was true—was not the only flaw in his methodology. He had hacked great lumps of concrete out of the walls and, upon returning from Poland, sent them to a lab to be tested for hydrogen cyanid
e. He did not, however, tell the lab where these samples came from. The lab pulverized them for the tests. When Jim Roth, the chemist who conducted the tests, learned the samples were from gas chamber walls, he declared that his findings were meaningless because hydrogen cyanide has a surface reaction. According to Roth, by crushing these large samples, the lab had severely diluted any hydrogen cyanide residue.* After Rampton read the chemist’s critique, Irving scowled angrily and announced, “I am not just going to annihilate evidence from Dr Roth, I am going to exterminate it when the times comes.”5 I was intent on ignoring Irving’s verbal assaults, but his use of “annihilate” and “exterminate” left me reeling.

  If, Rampton asked Irving, these were not homicidal gas chambers, as he claimed, how could there be any traces—however infinitesimal—of hydrogen cyanide in Leuchter’s samples? Irving, rather nonchalantly, answered that the traces were there because the room was used “for fumigating objects or cadavers.” I almost fell out of my chair. Rampton’s eyes opened wide. Sounding stupefied, he said, “Fumigating cadavers? . . . What makes you say that?” Judge Gray also seemed caught off balance: “I am sorry, this seems a crude question, but what is the point of gassing a corpse?”6 A twitter of nervous laughter greeted the judge’s question. Irving, sounding annoyed at having to explain something so obvious, replied that the corpses needed to be gassed because they were full of vermin. Rampton observed that these corpses were about to be incinerated and hardly needed gassing.

  Rampton also wondered why, if the room was intended for objects and cadavers, did the door have a thick glass peephole with an internal protective grill? Guards did not have to observe objects. Corpses could not break the glass. As usual, Irving had an explanation. This was a standard air-raid shelter door; therefore it came with a peephole. “It is rather like the ATM machines which have a little Braille pad on them, whether or not it is even a drive-by ATM machine. . . . Obviously drivers are not blind, because that is the cheapest way to make ATM machines.”7 Irving’s explanation—though a bizarre analogy—sounded logical. But it was wrong. The door was not produced on an assembly line. The Auschwitz construction office had requested the peephole.

  Irving then proposed another explanation. The room was an air-raid shelter. Rampton, unable—or unwilling—to mask his cynicism, declared, “Now it is an air raid shelter, is it? . . . It is either a cellar for gassing corpses, Mr Irving, or else it is an air raid shelter?” Irving’s response came quickly: “Did I say either or?” Rampton observed that if this was a shelter, it was far too small to accommodate the inmates. Irving suggested it was for the SS. Rampton thought it absurd for a “whole lot of heavily armed soldiers [to] run two-and-a-half or three miles from the SS barracks to these cellars at the far end of the Birkenau camp” and to do so “before they got squashed by the Allied bombs.”8 I recalled how six months earlier we had walked from one end of Birkenau to the other. Though I did not know it then, the walk had a forensic purpose.

  Rampton then turned to another document in the Auschwitz archives. In February 1943, camp building authorities had complained to Topf, the company that built the crematoria equipment, that they needed the ventilation blower “most urgently.” “Why,” Rampton wondered, “the urgency if it is a mere air raid shelter or a delousing chamber?” Irving now had a series of hypotheses. There was a typhus epidemic. The building inspector would not approve the installation without the ventilation system. The words “most urgently” did not mean anything at all. After listening to these explanations, Rampton added his own: “We want to start the big extermination program in March, get on with it.”9

  As the day drew to an end, Judge Gray asked Irving if he had done archival research on the gas chambers. Irving said that due to the machinations of his opponents, archives were generally closed to him. Judge Gray, sounding quite sympathetic, declared, “Really almost every avenue, you say, has been closed to you for one reason or another?” Looking pleased, Irving shook his head in affirmation. I was unnerved by Judge Gray’s apparent sympathy for Irving. Did he really think that Irving had been prevented from doing the proper research? Had he forgotten that Irving’s public declaration that he would scour archives for evidence on Auschwitz was made in 1988 and that Auschwitz had only banned him in the mid-1990s?10

  HOLOCAUST JUNKETS AND COKE IN A BOTTLE

  Soon it was time for Robert Jan to take the stand. Despite the macabre nature of his work, Robert Jan projects a boyish air. At scholarly meetings, for instance, he is the one who invariably knows the best nightspot in town. He had once showed up with his hair dyed a bright shade of orange. But a very different Robert Jan appeared in court. His usual design-school garb of leather jacket, turtleneck jersey, and jeans—all black—had been replaced by a finely tailored stylish dark gray three-piece suit with a perfectly fitting vest. The vest had a shawl collar. A pair of dark suede shoes and a dark blue tie with a yellow flower motif completed the ensemble. For a moment I found it hard to resolve that this dazzlingly dressed man standing in front of me was one of the world’s experts on Auschwitz and its killing apparatus.

  In his report Robert Jan had, by meticulously cross-referencing a broad array of evidence, completely demolished Irving’s claims about Auschwitz. He had built his case on prisoner testimony, German documents, blueprints, physical evidence, letters by camp administrators, bills of lading, work orders, and drawings by Sonderkommandos. His report not only laid waste to Irving’s claims, but was a stunning example of what historians do. They do not, as Irving kept demanding, seek a “smoking gun,” one document that will prove the existence of the gas chambers. They seek a nexus or convergence of evidence. I waited with some anticipation to see how Irving would attack this.

  As the clock neared 10:30, Robert Jan walked over and placed a five-volume set of small books on my desk. He said, “This Tanakh has been in our family for generations. I shall take my oath on it.” He then opened a folder, carefully removed a cloth yellow star, which his grandmother had worn during the war, and an envelope that contained the last letter his family received from his uncle in Westerbork, the concentration camp where Dutch Jews were held prior to deportation. “His name was Robert,” he added with a tiny catch in his voice; “I shall carry his letter and my grandmother’s star into the witness box.” And then, as he was about to walk away, he told me about his talk with Irving the previous week. Irving had shown him an aerial picture of Birkenau that, he claimed, his experts had just taken. When Robert Jan looked at the picture, he saw a series of crosses and stars in the field near the gas chamber ruins. I knew about those symbols. They had been placed there by a group of Polish teenage visitors and were removed in 1998. Clearly, the picture that Irving had shown Robert Jan had not “just” been taken. Either he had been lied to or he was lying to Robert Jan, a man who had repeatedly visited Auschwitz.

  Before Robert Jan was called to the stand, Irving rose to complain that, despite the fact that the rules of Civil Procedure called for complete equity between the parties, he stood “alone,” facing “powerful [and] wealthy litigants.” Pointing in our direction, he accused us of wresting control of the case away from him. We had, he charged, maneuvered to have Robert Jan testify early in the trial, rather than toward the end, thereby driving “a cart and horses” right through his preparations. This adjustment of the schedule was particularly galling, Irving declared, because it was done to accommodate Robert Jan’s “Holocaust junket to Stockholm.” Looking directly at Judge Gray, Irving asked why he was tolerating the court “being held hostage” to Robert Jan’s travels.11

  Rampton, already on his feet, was shaking his head in somewhat theatrical dismay. He reminded Judge Gray that on the first day of the trial, Irving had agreed to this schedule. Heather had already pulled out the first day’s transcript. Rampton read Irving’s words: “I am perfectly prepared to have Professor van Pelt come over in the middle of whatever else is going on.” Moreover, Irving had answered extensive questions about Auschwitz on the previous day. Th
e topic was already on the table.

  Judge Gray declined to alter the schedule, but he reassured Irving, “I am very conscious of the burden that is being placed upon you. It must be gigantic.” He insisted he was making a special effort to look after Irving’s interests because he was a litigant in person. I sat there frustrated and even more annoyed. Irving had brought the case. He had chosen to represent himself because he felt no lawyer could do as good a job. Now Judge Gray was bending over backward to accommodate him. Behind me I heard Rampton muttering as he waited. When Judge Gray recognized him, he said, “True it is there is an inequality of resources; true also it is, however, that my clients are defending a suit brought by Mr Irving. It reminds one of the old French proverb: ‘These animals are very naughty. They defend themselves when they are attacked.’” Irving angrily turned to Rampton: “That proverbs cuts both ways, Mr Rampton.” Judge Gray, anxious to defuse matters, declared, “Yes, well that is enough of that.”12

  Irving began by asking Robert Jan if he was “deeply moved” when he first visited Birkenau. “More than moved. I was frightened.” With a bit of a chuckle, Irving said, “Ghosts of the dead were still all around?” Robert Jan assured Irving that it was not a matter of ghosts—in which he did not believe—but the “awesome responsibility” of studying Auschwitz.13 Irving, rather abruptly, turned to Judge Gray to warn him that some of his questions might seem “frightfully obtuse.” He was, he explained, “laying a bit of trap . . . which will be sprung either before or after lunch.”14 Irving smiled mischievously.